Enhancing Tactile Internet Reliability: AI-Driven Resilience in NG-EPON Networks

To guarantee the reliability of Tactile Internet (TI) applications such as telesurgery, which demand extremely high reliability and are experiencing rapid expansion, we propose a novel smart resilience mechanism for Next-Generation Ethernet Passive Optical Networks (NG-EPONs). Our architecture integrates Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN)-Enabled Broadband Access (SEBA) platform to proactively enhance network reliability and performance. By harnessing the AI’s capabilities, our system automatically detects and localizes fiber faults, establishing backup communication links using Radio Frequency over Glass (RFoG) to prevent service disruptions. This empowers NG-EPONs to maintain uninterrupted, high-quality network service even in the face of unexpected failures, meeting the stringent Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements of critical TI applications. Our AI model, rigorously validated through 5-fold cross-validation, boasts an average accuracy of 81.49%, with a precision of 84.33%, recall of 78.18%, and F1-score of 81.00%, demonstrating its robust performance in fault detection and prediction. The AI model triggers immediate corrective actions through the SDN controller. Simulation results confirm the efficacy of our proposed mechanism in terms of delay, system throughputs and packet drop rate, and bandwidth waste, ultimately ensuring the delivery of high-quality network services.