FlexNGIA

A Fully-Flexible Internet Architecture
for the Next-Generation Tactile Internet

What is FlexNGIA ?

From virtual reality and telepresence, to augmented reality, holoportation, and remotely controlled robotics, these future network applications promise an unprecedented development for society, economics and culture by revolutionizing the way we live, learn, work and play. In order to deploy such futuristic applications and to cater to their performance requirements, recent trends stressed the need for the Tactile Internet, an Internet that, according to the International Telecommunication Union, combines ultra low latency with extremely high availability, reliability and security.

Unfortunately, today's Internet falls short when it comes to providing such stringent requirements due to several fundamental limitations in the design of the current network architecture and communication protocols. As a result the goal of this project is design a novel Internet architecture that is able to overcome those limitations by efficiently harnessing recent technological advances in terms of virtualization, network softwarization and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in order to design A novel Fully-Flexible Internet Architecture for the Next-Generation Tactile Internet (FlexNGIA).

What are the FlexNGIA goals?

The goal of the FlexNGIA project is to :

  • Analyze the characteristics and requirements of future network applications.

  • Highlight the limitations of the traditional Internet architecture and protocols and their inability to cater to future applications’ requirements.

  • Design the future Internet architecture, FlexNGIA, a Fully-Flexible Next-Generation Internet Architecture.

  • Provide use-cases to discuss the potential mechanisms that could be offered by FlexNGIA to ensure the required performance and reliability guarantees for future applications.

  • Identify key research challenges to further develop FlexNGIA towards a full-fledged architecture for the future Tactile Internet.

Know More about FlexNGIA Architecture

  • Watch the recording of the keynote on FlexNGIA delivered at ACM SIGCOMM NEAT 2019 available on the ACM Library or on YouTube

  • Read the details in the following paper: M. F. Zhani and H. Elbakoury, "FlexNGIA: A Flexible Internet Architecture for the Next-Generation Tactile Internet," Journal of Network and Systems Management, Springer 2020. [PDF, PPT, BibTex]

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FlexNGIA Features

  • Design, develop, and deploy layer-3-and-above protocols and headers that are customized to your applications

  • Unleash the potential of network softwarization, virtualization technologies, in-network computing to build customized application-aware network functions and service chains

  • Customize your network applications and protocols to overcome the limitations of the traditional Internet protocols (e.g., TCP, UDP, QUIC, SCTP)