Network flexibility and network determinism are two key aspects to serve upcoming applications like e.g., autonomous driving, haptic sensing or 3D holographic displaying. These high-demanding applications require a flexible network setup with a guaranteed on-time quality-of-service. To address this requirement, we conduct research along four different axes of flexible and deterministic wireless networking.
The first axis focuses on flexible end-to-end architectures. This is achieved by techniques like network slicing and different softwarized solutions across multiple network domains (e.g. SDR, SDN).
The second axis focuses on heterogeneous networking, which includes the management of multi-technology network devices which is achieved by techniques like virtual MACs, multi-radio access technologies, and location-aware handovers among different communication technologies.
The third axis focuses on the research of ultra-low latency networking, which is key for upcoming time-critical applications. We focus our research on two specific topics, i.e. reliable vehicular communication networks and low-latency/high-capacity networks (incl. mmWave and THz) for interactive AR/VR, also extended with intelligent reflective surfaces.
Complementing the three axes above, the fourth axis is oriented towards AI-enhanced network programmability to intelligently assign network resources and to orchestrate and to allocate functions in the network to optimize the network performance, including orchestration of different functions via NetApp and NFV placement.
