Softwarized Infrastructures for Tactile Internet Applications

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The Internet has evolved from a fixed and text based-Internet to a multimedia mobile Internet and finally to the Internet of Things (IoT). The Tactile Internet is the next foreseen stage. It will enable haptic communications over networks in addition to the visual and auditory communications of today. This will certainly revolutionize the set of services and applications provided today by the Internet. Many new applications and services are expected from sectors such as tele-operations, immersive entertainment systems, robotics and manufacturing. These applications and services have very stringent latency reliability requirements. The latency requirement for instance, may be as stringent as 1 ms round trip for applications such as remote robotic surgery. Softwarized infrastructures support applications through software-oriented operations. The key enablers are cloud computing, edge/fog computing, network function virtualization (NFV) and software defined networks (SDN). These infrastructures offer a great level of flexibility and are actually the pillars of next generation networks. However, they still do not offer the levels of ultra-low latency and ultra-high reliability required by Tactile Internet. Several softwarized infrastructures have been proposed in the past to deal with these peculiar requirements. Some deal with the architectural aspects, while others focus on the algorithmic aspects. However, they all suffer from significant deficiencies. The long-term objective of this proposal is to specify and validate original and innovative softwarized infrastructures for Tactile Internet applications. The first short term objective is the design and validation of architectural modules and protocols and the second the specification and design of the algorithms that will run in the architectural modules. The methodology will rely on a yearly iteration approach with each iteration building on the previous ones and taking into account the significant evolution in technologies . This research program will have major impacts. On the one hand it will take softwarized infrastructures to the next level by catering to ultra-low latency and ultra-high reliability. In addition to Tactile Internet applications which will benefit from such infrastructures, other applications that are not yet foreseen will also benefit from it. This research will position Canada as a world leader in industries such as tele-health, industrial IoT, and 6G in which Tactile Internet is expected to play a major role. Over the 5 years, a postdoctoral fellow, 4 PhD students and 6 Master students will be trained and will acquire critical skills in softwarized infrastructures, Tactile Internet applications,  and related technologies such as Machine Learning (ML). They will therefore be able to contribute to the growth of these industries.