From virtual reality and telepresence, to augmented reality, holoportation, and remotely controlled robotics, these future network applications promise an unprecedented development for society, economics and culture by revolutionizing the way we live, learn, work and play. In order to deploy such futuristic applications and to cater to their performance requirements, recent trends stressed the need for the “Tactile Internet”, an Internet that, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), combines ultra low latency with extremely high availability, reliability and security (ITU-T Technology Watch Report. The Tactile Internet, 2014). Unfortunately, today’s Internet falls short when it comes to providing such stringent requirements due to several fundamental limitations in the design of the current network architecture and communication protocols. This brings the need to rethink the network architecture and protocols, and efficiently harness recent technological advances in terms of virtualization and network softwarization to design the Tactile Internet of the future. In this paper, we start by analyzing the characteristics and requirements of future networking applications. We then highlight the limitations of the traditional network architecture and protocols and their inability to cater to these requirements. Afterward, we put forward a novel network architecture adapted to the Tactile Internet called FlexNGIA, a Flexible Next-Generation Internet Architecture. We then describe some use-cases where we discuss the potential mechanisms and control loops that could be offered by FlexNGIA in order to ensure the required performance and reliability guarantees for future applications. Finally, we identify the key research challenges to further develop FlexNGIA towards a full-fledged architecture for the future Tactile Internet.

中文翻译：

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FlexNGIA：用于下一代触觉互联网的灵活互联网架构

从虚拟现实和远程呈现，到增强现实、全息传输和遥控机器人技术，这些未来的网络应用通过彻底改变我们的生活、学习、工作和娱乐方式，有望为社会、经济和文化带来前所未有的发展。为了部署此类未来应用并满足其性能要求，最近的趋势强调需要“触觉互联网”，根据国际电信联盟 (ITU) 的说法，这种互联网结合了超低延迟和极高的可用性，可靠性和安全性（ITU-T 技术观察报告。触觉互联网，2014 年）。很遗憾，由于当前网络架构和通信协议设计的几个基本限制，今天的 Internet 在提供如此严格的要求方面存在不足。这就需要重新思考网络架构和协议，并有效利用虚拟化和网络软件化方面的最新技术进步来设计未来的触觉互联网。在本文中，我们首先分析了未来网络应用的特点和需求。然后，我们强调了传统网络架构和协议的局限性以及它们无法满足这些要求。随后，我们提出了一种适应触觉互联网的新型网络架构，称为FlexNGIA，一种灵活的下一代互联网架构。然后，我们描述了一些用例，在这些用例中，我们讨论了 FlexNGIA 可以提供的潜在机制和控制回路，以确保未来应用程序所需的性能和可靠性保证。最后，我们确定了进一步开发 FlexNGIA 以实现未来触觉互联网的成熟架构的关键研究挑战。