How Far Are Wireless Networks from Being Truly Deterministic?

With the rapid development of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology and machine-type communications, various emerging applications appear in industrial productions and our daily lives. Among these, applications like industrial sensing and controlling, remote surgery, and automatic driving require an extremely low latency and a very small jitter. Delivering information deterministically has become one of the biggest challenges for modern wire-line and wireless communications. In this paper, we present a review of currently available wire-line deterministic networks and discuss the main challenges to build wireless deterministic networks. We also discuss and propose several potential techniques enabling wireless networks to provide deterministic communications. By elaborating the coding/modulation schemes of the physical layer and managing the channel-access/packet-scheduling at the media access control (MAC) layer, it is believed that wireless deterministic communications can be realized in the near future.