Towards the Tactile Internet: Decreasing Communication Latency with Network Coding and Software Defined Networking

5G communication networks enable the steering and control of Internet of Things and, therefore, require extremely low latency communications referred to as the tactile Internet. In this paper, we show that the massive use of network coding throughout the network significantly improves latency and reduces the frequency of packet re-transmission. Thus, an architecture built around network coding may be a feasible road towards realizing the tactile internet vision. Our contribution is threefold: (i) we show how network coding improves latency and reduces packet re-transmission with respect to other coding schemes analytically, (ii) we present our implementation of a network coding capable software router and support our analytical results with realistic measurements, and (iii) we show that, in contrast with current packet-switched networks, network coding can be seamlessly integrated in Software Defined Networks (SDN) using our software router as a Virtual Network Function. Such combination of network coding and SDN summons a codecentric networking architecture that can be a promising host to future 5G systems.