Softwarization and Network Coding in the Mobile Edge Cloud for the Tactile Internet

Future communication systems, such as those enabling the Tactile Internet, will face disruptive changes compared to the state-of-the-art systems, which are 1) highly dynamic topology changes; 2) replacement of the end-to-end paradigm by real mesh topologies; and 3) a massive number of devices. To overcome these disruptive changes, future communication systems will substitute specialized hardware with generic hardware boxes and the softwarization paradigm. Furthermore, this approach will allow for a quick deployment of new services, which was known to the cloud service already. In this paper, we will introduce the most prominent candidates for softwarization such as software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) and explain the importance of these technologies for the upcoming 5G communication system and Tactile Internet applications realizing novel mobile edge computing, storage, and networking solutions. Specifically, we will discuss use cases of SDN/NFV such as network coding as a service, and ultrareliable distributed edge caching. Finally, we will describe our holistic testbed at the 5G Lab Germany as a fundamental step toward creating an experiment infrastructure that anticipates the 5G communication systems and Tactile Internet applications.