2025-04-102025-04-10https://boris-portal.unibe.ch/handle/20.500.12422/209650Communication systems tried to improve the quality of communication to become close to real in-person communication. The vision of immersive communication is to enable interactions with remote people and environments such that users get the impression to be really inside a remote or virtual environment. Immersive communications may add additional services and functions and even improve real in-person communication. Augmented reality, virtual reality, and haptics are key technologies to enable immersive communications, with extreme requirements in terms of bandwidth, reliability, and latency. The targets are few milliseconds, combined with high-bandwidth (e.g., for 360 ° video), and/or high reliability (e.g., 99.9999 %, for interactive sensor/actor based applications such as haptics). NICO addresses these extreme challenges and requirements by a set of various approaches on protocol, network architecture, and implementation architecture level. In NICO we intend to come closer to these targets by addressing the following interrelated research challenges, which have to be considered in an integrated way.- viewport prediction algorithms in 360 °, video based on sensor-based localization, tracking and rotation/movement predictions using advanced machine learning (ML) concepts in order to improve users' Quality-of-Experience (QoE),- disruptive methods to identify QoE parameters in immersive communications combining system measurements and psychological behaviors,- implementation of an advanced integrated hardware and software platform including operating system scheduling for user-level virtualization and the support of hardware accelerators for immersive communication processing in order to support low latencies and high throughput, - novel mechanisms to minimize latencies by (extended) caching mechanisms exploiting in-network processing for immersive communications,- novel network protocols based on information-centric networking and network coding to support low-latency communication, - original algorithms and mechanisms for service migration to minimize latency between mobile users and service entities, including the novel concept of Floating Services.