Prior Internet designs encompassed the fixed, mobile, and lately the "things" Internet. In a natural evolution to these, the notion of the Tactile Internet is emerging, which allows one to transmit touch and actuation in real-time. With voice and data communications driving the designs of the current Internets, the Tactile Internet will enable haptic communications, which in turn will be a paradigm shift in how skills and labor are digitally delivered globally. Design efforts for both the Tactile Internet and the underlying haptic communications are in its infancy. The aim of this article is thus to review some of the most stringent design challenges, as well as propose first avenues for specific solutions to enable the Tactile Internet revolution.

As a new way to design, deploy and manage network services, network functions virtualization (NFV) decouples the network functions, from one or more physical network infrastructures and black boxes so they can run in software. It therefore comes as no surprise that NFV originated from service providers, who were looking to improve the deployment of new network services to support their revenue and growth objectives. Within the NFV ecosystem, high availability and low latency are one of the key QoS benefits that service providers can expect from the 5G Cloud and the NFV networks to make delay-critical services such as remote surgery a reality. Therefore, network services should be placed, chained and routed through the network considering users/tenants stringent quality of service (QoS) and service-level agreement (SLA) requirements. To this end, routing and placement optimization plays a major role in improving network performance and the overall network cost. In this paper, we study the problem of virtual network functions (VNFs) placement and routing across the physical hosts to minimize overall latency defined as the queuing delay within the edge clouds and in network links. In that respect, this work takes a holistic view by considering not only VNFs chaining and placement problem but also considering the flows routing aspect since these two problems are inter-related and have a major impact on network latency.

For many, this is no longer a valid question and the case is considered settled with SDN/NFV (Software Defined Networking/Network Function Virtualization) providing the inevitable innovation enablers towards the realization of a virtualized, programmable, and flexible 5G network. As SDN along with other technology enablers (including NFV) are still in the process of evolution, the first commercial deployment of 5G may take few years. However, some companies are claiming the availability of 5G solutions, but considering the monumental task of softwarization of mobile cellular networks there are genuine concerns that we may only see some point solutions involving SDN technology instead of a fully virtualized SDN-enabled 5G mobile network. In order to determine the technology readiness of SDN solutions in the context of 5G networks, this survey paper attempts to identify all important obstacles in the way, and looks at the state of the art of the relevant research. This survey is different from the previous surveys on SDN-based mobile networks as it focuses on the salient problems and discusses solutions proposed within and outside SDN literature. Our main focus is on fronthaul, backward compatibility, supposedly disruptive nature of SDN deployment, business cases and monetization of SDN related upgrades, latency of general purpose processors (GPP), and additional security vulnerabilities that softwarization brings along to the mobile network. We have also provided a summary of the architectural developments in SDN-based mobile network landscape, including deployment options for SDN within NFV framework, as not all work can be covered under the focused issues. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the state of the art of SDN-based mobile networks and clearly points out the gaps in the technology.

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are unpredictable by nature. Providing any kind of reliability for quality of service (QoS) in such networks is challenging. Quantifying available resources accurately, avoiding interference with ongoing QoS traffic and adapting to QoS violations caused by nodes' mobility are the main concerns for the design of an efficient admission control protocol in MANETs. Adaptive admission control (AAC), a novel admission control protocol which uses robust and accurate resource estimation and prediction techniques for relevant admission decisions has been proposed. Furthermore, AAC uses statistical QoS provision to counteract the QoS threatening mobility. Through simulations, we show that our proposed scheme outperforms existing approaches in terms of correctness and overall performance.

This paper studies an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted wireless network, where a UAV is dispatched to gather information from ground sensor nodes (SN) and transfer the collected data to the depot. The information freshness is captured by the age of information (AoI) metric, whilst the energy consumption of the UAV is seen as another performance criterion. Most importantly, the AoI and energy efficiency are inherently competing metrics, since decreasing the AoI requires the UAV returning to the depot more frequently, leading to a higher energy consumption. To this end, we design UAV paths that optimize these two competing metrics jointly and reveal the Pareto frontier. To formulate this problem, a multi-objective mixed integer linear programming (MILP) is proposed with a flow-based constraint set and we apply Bender's decomposition on the proposed formulation. Numerical results show that the proposed method allows deriving non-dominated solutions among two competing metrics when designing the UAV path.

Network slicing is an emerging area of research, featuring a logical arrangement of resources to operate as individual networks, thus allowing for massively customizable service and tenant requirements. The focus of this paper is to present the design of a flexible 5G architecture for network slicing, building on SDN and NFV technologies as enablers. More specifically, we place the emphasis on techniques that provide efficient utilization of substrate resources for network slicing, ultimately optimizing network performance. The key areas of consideration in our architecture revolve around flexible service-tailored mobility, service-aware QoS/QoE control as well as network-wide orchestration.