Qualitative Communication for Emerging Network Applications with New IP

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, AR/VR 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.