Suitability of SDN and MEC to facilitate digital twin communication over LTE-A

Abstract

Haptic is the modality that complements traditional multimedia, i.e., audiovisual, to evolve the next wave of innovation at which the Internet data stream can be exchanged to enable remote skills and control applications. This will require ultra-low latency and ultra-high reliability to evolve the mobile experience into the era of Digital Twin and Tactile Internet. While the 5th generation of mobile networks is not yet widely deployed, Long-Term Evolution (LTE-A) latency remains much higher than the 1 ms requirement for the Tactile Internet and therefore the Digital Twin. This work investigates an interesting solution based on the incorporation of Software-defined networking (SDN) and Multi-access Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) technologies in an LTE-A network, to deliver future multimedia applications over the Tactile Internet while overcoming the QoS challenges. Several network scenarios were designed and simulated using Riverbed modeler and the performance was evaluated using several time-related Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as throughput, End-2-End (E2E) delay, and jitter. The best scenario possible is clearly the one integrating MEC and SDN approaches, where the overall delay, jitter, and throughput for haptics- attained 2 ms, 0.01 ms, and 1000 packets per second. The results obtained give clear evidence that the integration of, both SDN and MEC, in LTE-A indicates performance improvement, and fulfills the standard requirements in terms of the above KPIs, for realizing a Digital Twin/Tactile Internet-based system.