TINetS3: SDN-Driven Network Slicing Enabling Scenario-Based Applications in Tactile Internet

Network slicing (NS), a key enabler, plays a crucial role in implementing tactile Internet (TI). This TI promises scalable, customisable, isolated, and logical end-to-end networks (i.e., network slices) by offering dedicated and tailored networking solutions on demand to meet the customer’s need. Research in NS for TI is essential to realise haptic communications to achieve ultra-low latency, high throughput, and high reliability for real-time immersive and interactive environments in fifth-generation (5G) and beyond 5G (B5G). This article proposes a novel network slicing mechanism based on TI communication infrastructure for three different scenarios (TINetS3) leveraging software-defined networking (SDN) with Open vSwitch (OVS) to resolve the issue of provisioning and controlling the network slices on demand. This communication infrastructure is sliced under various traffic/application loads using pre-designed slice configurations. We develop algorithms for three scenarios, i.e., topology slicing, service slicing, and emergency slicing, to have a tailored slice for the physical infrastructure according to the network requirements. We validate the system performance by measuring the key performance indicators (KPIs), such as throughput and round-trip time (RTT), to optimise the network resources by network emulator. These KPIs show the expected experimental results aligned with the preset allocated spectrum for slices and RTT constraint values in various scenarios. The simulation results show the efficacy of our NS algorithms in designing tailored and customised slices as per the network-required KPIs. Finally, we validated our algorithms by comparing them with state-of-the-art algorithms.

I. Introduction

The concept of the tactile Internet (TI) has revolutionised the way we see how human operators and remotely present robots can be connected and carry operational information over the Internet. The area of real-time applications has served a new level of immersive experience due to an emerging concept of tactile Internet [1]. The recent advancements in haptic and kinematic sensors and actuators [2], along with artificial intelligence (AI) in TI, have risen beyond the traditional audio and visual feedback [3], [4]. Particularly, TI can be defined as a new communication framework that allows remote access, perception, reception, analysis, manipulation, control, sense and/or touch the real and virtual bodies with or without audio and visual content over a significant distance [5].