5G NFV-Based Tactile Internet for Mission-Critical IoT Services

Mission-critical Internet of Things (MC-IoT) will play a vital role in remote healthcare, haptic interaction, and industrial automation. On the one hand, in such application fields, haptic applications have become more critical. Benefitting from the development of the fifth-generation (5G) wireless communication networks and the technological advances of Internet of Things (IoT), the tactile Internet (TI), which provides control communications through the transmission of touch and actuation in real time, has been envisioned as a promising enabler of MC-IoT services. On the other hand, different MC-IoT services could have diverse requirements. This requires a flexible network architecture for enabling different MC-IoT services. Network function virtualization (NFV) is a promising method to tackle this issue. To provide MC-IoT services flexibly, in this article, a 5G network architecture based on the NFV technology is designed to support the implementation of the TI. Moreover, a utility function model is proposed for the performance evaluation of the 5G NFV-based TI. Considering the just-noticeable difference (JND) in the human perception and the corresponding network costs on providing MC-IoT services, a human perception-based TI utility optimization (ACTION) algorithm is developed to optimize the utility for 5G NFV-based TI. The simulation results indicate that the maximum utility achieved under the proposed ACTION algorithm is improved by 35.4% to the network slice requests (NSRs) implementation algorithm.