Joint wireless resource allocation and service function chaining scheduling for Tactile Internet

Abstract

With the growing popularity of immersive interaction applications, e.g., industrial teleoperation and remote-surgery, the service demand of communication network is switching from packet delivery to remote control-based communication. The Tactile Internet (TI) is a promising paradigm of remote control-based wireless communication service, which enables tactile users to perceive, manipulate, or control real and virtual objects in perceived real-time. To support TI, the ultra-reliable and low latency communication service is required. However, the multi-tactile to multi-teleoperator interactive property, in-network computing demand, ordered service function chaining (SFC) requirement, as well as other features of TI, challenge the ultra-low latency provisioning. This paper studies the joint wireless resource allocation and SFC routing and scheduling problem for end-to-end delay reduction. We first formulate the problem as an end-to-end delay minimization problem constrained to SFC and wireless resource. Then, a distributed and cooperative scheme, which consists of the min–max (MM) wireless resource allocation algorithm and the delay-aware scheduling (DAS) of SFC algorithm, thus called MM-DAS, is proposed to address the problem. In MM-DAS, we use the MM algorithm for uplink/downlink communication at wireless edges, while DAS is proposed to solve the virtual network function (VNF) mapping and scheduling at the wireless core, for achieving the goal of providing low end-to-end delay to tactile–teleoperator pairs. The simulation results have illustrated the efficiency of the proposal for low end-to-end delay performance provisioning in TI environments.