The existing Internet treats all packets equally, which means that a packet can be dropped entirely due to network congestion. To address this issue, a new packetization scheme and transport paradigm called Qualitative Communication, along with its associated packet wash operation, have been proposed. Qualitative Communication is particularly beneficial for transmitting multimedia content in the presence of network congestion. This paper specifically focuses on the transmission of JPEG/MPEG packets and investigates the characteristics of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) used in the JPEG/MPEG encoding process. The proposed encoding scheme organizes the quantization coefficients of all image blocks in a packet based on their significance for image decoding and reconstruction. Additionally, the paper explores the idea that end users may be willing to accept a certain level of quality degradation rather than receiving nothing at all within an expected time frame. The benefits provided by the proposed mechanisms are discussed, and simulation results validate the improvements in the successful packet delivery ratio and the end user's level of satisfaction.

Satellite networking has been a very active research area in both academia and industry recently. Starlink provides high-speed, low-latency Internet access. More companies have claimed to provide similar services soon. It is expected that different industries will embrace satellite network business in the future. This paper reviews the achievements in satellite-related works in standard organizations (IETF and 3GPP) from the networking perspective (Layer 2/3 and above). The issues and challenges in different areas are analyzed, such as IP networking for massive satellite constellations, wireless network architecture for Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) integration, etc. Based on the latest developments, the paper envisions the evolution direction and outlines the study items for satellite networks in 6G.

Emerging cross-reality (XR) applications, including holography, augmented, virtual, and mixed reality, are characterized by unprecedented requirements for Quality of Experience (QoE), largely exceeding those currently attainable. To cope with these requirements, noticeable efforts and a number of initiatives are ongoing to enhance the current communications technologies, especially in the direction of supporting ultralow latency and increased bandwidth. This work proposes an architecture that puts together the key enablers to support future XR applications, highlighting the shortcomings of existing technologies and leveraging the ongoing innovations. It demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed architecture by describing the processes driving the platform with relevant use case scenarios, and mapping the envisioned functionality to existing tools.

Stringent end-to-end latency guarantee service has been foreseen to be required by many emerging applications. With the traffic driven by mobile devices continuing to dominate the Internet, end-to-end latency guarantee needs to take into account of the latency incurred on the Internet as well as in the mobile networks. In this paper, we consider the latest 5G cellular network and its architecture, design a special type of slices namely, Latency Guarantee Service (LGS) slice. A unified 3GPP data plane protocol stack based on New IP is also introduced.

The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry constitutes roughly 5-9% of the overall energy consumption, and may quickly grow to as high as 20%. With the global warming challenge, the ICT sector sets its net-zero emission goal to be achieved by 2050. This paper discusses how newly proposed New IP framework and its three major components: Shipping Specification, Contract Insertion, Qualitative Communication, support green Internet and reduce energy consumption in IP routers. This paper also summarizes Future research opportunities to enhance the reduction of network power consumption based on the New IP framework.

This document proposes a method of addressing and routing for massive Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations. It is based on the concepts and technologies of New IP. LEO satellite networks can be used for Internet access and for the Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) integration with 5G and beyond. Our new addressing method leverages the characteristics of satellites with known orbit elements; and simplifies the satellite identification by using limited indexes. The new routing method combines semantic addressing with source routing and generates a new semantic routing scheme. Compared with traditional methods, the new proposal dramatically reduces the workload in satellite, such as table size, TCAM (Ternary Content-addressable Memory) lookups, and packet header size. Thus, it is more suitable to network in space where the harsh environment will restrict the hardware performance, power consumption, link bandwidth and system complexity.

Precise end-to-end latency guarantee is predicted to be required by many emerging applications. On the other hand, the network traffic will continue to be dominated by mobile devices. Therefore, the end-to-end latency is composed of the latency incurred in the Internet as well as in the mobile networks. In this paper, we target to address the end-to-end latency guarantee requirement for downlink traffic by leveraging the previously proposed 5G slice namely, Latency Guarantee Service (LGS) slice. The mechanisms and procedures are proposed by taking the compatibility of 5G architecture into consideration. The simulation results show that the downlink flows which are admitted by the LGS slices are verified to satisfy the end-to-end latency constraint consistently.

Precise end-to-end latency guarantee is predicted to be required by many emerging applications. On the other hand, the network traffic will continue to be dominated by mobile devices. Therefore, the end-to-end latency is composed of the latency incurred in the Internet as well as in the mobile networks. In this paper, we target to address the end-to-end latency guarantee requirement for downlink traffic by leveraging a new type of 5G slice namely, LGS (Latency Guarantee Service) slice. The mechanisms and procedures are proposed by taking the compatibility of 5G architecture into consideration. The simulation results show that the downlink flows which are admitted by the LGS slices could satisfy the end-to-end latency constraint consistently.

Autonomous driving is complemented by remote driving when it falls short. Remote driving requires the end-to-end transmission latency between the vehicles and cloud servers to be extremely small and within a desired deadline, which gives the drivers enough time to respond to emergent situations. This paper focuses on the multi-camera assisted remote driving scenarios, in which images captured by multiple cameras are concatenated and encapsulated in one jumbo packet for overhead reduction and energy efficiency at router side. Jumbo packets are more sensitive to network congestion since they might be completely lost in the current Internet implementation. Qualitative Communication is a novel transport paradigm, that reduces the treatment and processing of packets in the network into even finer granularity. The paper illustrates how Qualitative Communication along with other components of New IP could improve the multiple-camera assisted remote driving experience. Some preliminary results show that the jumbo packet delivery success ratio can be significantly increased.

Qualitative Communication has been proposed to increase the responsiveness of a network due to packet loss. The basic idea is to allow the network to drop part of the payload to preserve the integrity of the session (as opposed to dropping whole packets as in TCP). We consider this idea in the context of AR/VR and see how selectively dropping payload naturally fits with such an application where the data can be easily split within some critical and non-critical data. We present basic mechanism to leverage qualitative communications in 360 degree video streaming, as well as a pre-fetching scheme. We evaluate this proposal on actual 360 video traces and show the significant improvement of our proposal versus a vanilla transmission mechanism.

The paper proposes knowledge inference and reasoning functionalities to be supported in a distributed manner by network nodes. The recently thriving Internet framework, i.e., New IP could facilitate the enabler of the proposed functionalities with in-network intelligence. The paper describes the new knowledge reasoning request and response procedure with an IoT use case. The performance improvement over the legacy approach is analyzed and illustrated with different parameter settings. It is proved that the proposed in-network knowledge reasoning approach could significantly decreases the average number of nodes that the requests travel in the network, resulting in less waiting time for requesters. On the other hand, there is barely any increase on the message overhead.

Not all data units carried over a packet stream are equal in value. Often some portions of data are more significant than others. Qualitative Communication is a paradigm that leverages the ‘quality of data’ attribute to improve both the end-user experience and the overall performance of the network specifically when adverse network conditions occur. Qualitative Communication allows that the content that is received differs from the one that is transmitted but maintains enough of its information to still be useful. This paper describes Qualitative Communication, its packetization methods, and the corresponding mechanisms to process the packets at a finer granularity with New IP. The paper also discusses its benefits to the emerging and future network applications through a couple of use cases in video streaming, multi-camera assisted remote driving, ARNR and holographic streaming, and high precision networking. Some preliminary performance results are illustrated to show such benefits. This suggests that Qualitative Communication will find wide applications for many use cases.

Precise Quality of Service guarantee, especially stringent latency (in-time) guarantee for packet delivery is demanded by many emerging applications, such as remote surgery, autonomous driving, etc. However, today's Internet's best effort and statistical multiplexing do not assure this type of network services at packet level. In this paper, we take advantage of the contract component proposed in the New Internet Protocol (New IP) framework, a packet that requires end-to-end in-time guarantee can be informed to each forwarding network node. Given there might be multiple latency-sensitive packets for the same output port that need to be scheduled, an optimal scheduling algorithm (TDMS) is proposed to achieve minimal average dwell time at each router during packet forwarding. The supporting theorems are proved to verify the simplicity and validity of the proposed algorithm. The simulation results also confirm that the proposed TDMS achieves the best performances on packet in-time delivery and average packet dwell time in routers.

Qualitative Communication has been proposed to reduce the granularity of packet dropping due to congestion, from packet level to chunk level, which can significantly improve the user experienced latency and reduce the number of packet retransmissions under the reliable transmissions. This paper proposes an approach to achieve Qualitative Communication by applying random linear network coding to chunks in packet payload. With the help of New IP framework, the network can efficiently perform packet wash in order to retain as many chunks in the packets as possible when congestion happens. The paper proposes several advanced features to further boost the benefits of this approach.

The IP is a primary data plane protocol on the Internet, which has several deficiencies when addressing the needs of modern digital society involving machine-to-machine communication and a remarkably enhanced user experience. New IP is an advanced network protocol specification to modernize the network layer without changing the fundamental Internet architecture. New IP envisions a new header format with 3 functional characteristics, i.e., shipping spec, contract spec, and payload spec. Using these fundamental blocks, New IP proposes a new data plane forwarding paradigm with far more advanced capabilities, such as ManyNets addressing, high precision services and qualitative communications.

The current Internet protocol suite, with its best-effort semantics, can result in potentially very different delivery characteristics for packets. Actually, no two paths (or even different packet flows on the same path) can be assumed to have identical properties in terms of bandwidth, delay and jitter. However, multi-site remote collaboration applications are highly inter-dependent and must remain consistent across multiple users. To this end, we introduce a new network capability, called coordinated communication service, and propose coordination points to support coordinated delivery of multiple flows in the network.

When a content is published in the Internet, it is usually associated with many semantics information, which can be used to identify and discover the content. The current Internet protocols do not support the semantics aware content request very efficiently. By taking advantage of the recently developed Big IP Protocol (BPP), which brings the intelligence into the network while still maintaining the traditional communication paradigm, we propose in this paper a novel semantics and deviation aware content request scheme. It considers the possibility that a consumer may be able to accept the semantics information of the received content having certain deviation from his/her requirements. The paper proposes the structures of BPP enabled content request and content messages, as well as the detailed procedures taken by the network nodes to process those messages. The performance analysis shows that the latency experienced by the consumer is reduced tremendously compared to the traditional approach, with the extra overhead to be reasonable small in different settings and scenarios.

Segment Routing (SR) reintroduces source routing to networking. While SR has been defined for MPLS and IPv6 data planes, there are considerable problems with respect to increased path overhead in various deployments. This paper presents a new framework that is designed to overcome the SR challenges with a new routing paradigm, PPR (Preferred Path Routing). PPR is intended as enabler for next generation source routing by minimizing the data plane overhead caused in SR, which includes the network layer tax and processing overhead that is imposed on packets, critical specifically for small packets that are characteristic to many 5G applications. PPR extends SR for IP data planes without needing to replace existing hardware or even to upgrade the data plane. In addition, PPR allows dynamic path QoS reservations viz., bandwidth, and resources for providing deterministic queuing latency.

The paper proposes the solution to guarantee the extremely low latency or even zero latency to the moving subscribers in requesting the multimedia streaming service. The solution leverages the competent network resources that could be provided by the 5G network and constructs a slice with appropriate resource allocation on a per user basis. The solution is context aware, including user's location, travel route, driving speed, and road traffic condition. The network resource allocation algorithms are proposed to make sure that the storage and bandwidth are appropriately reserved to provision the video content blocks to the designated base stations. The moving subscriber can experience no latency in receiving the video content with exceedingly efficient storage usage and reasonable bandwidth expense.

An object is understood as adynamic entity whose attributes can be observed and modified through the occurences of its events. In order to reason about such an object, a logical language and a tableau method are presented in this paper. Objects and their properties and can be described by a set of formulate based on their signatures. The tableau method is an extension and a development of a first-order tableau method. To confute a finite set of formulae based on their signatures. The confute a finite set of formuale is to construct a set of tableaux and define some dependency relations on them. A simple illustrative example is also given to show how to reason about objects using our method.