The next frontier in communications is teleoperation -- manipulation and control of remote environments. Compared to conventional networked applications, teleoperation poses widely different requirements, ultra-low latency (ULL) being the primary one. Teleoperation, along with a host of other applications requiring ULL communication, is termed as Tactile Internet (TI). A significant redesign of conventional networking techniques is necessary to realize TI applications. Further, these advancements can be evaluated only when meaningful performance metrics are available. However, existing TI performance metrics fall severely short of comprehensively characterizing TI performance. In this paper, we take the first step towards bridging this gap. To this end, we propose a method that captures the fine-grained performance of TI in terms of delay and precision. We take Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) as the basis of our work and identify whether it is sufficient in characterizing TI systems. We refine DTW by developing a framework called Effective Time- and Value-Offset (ETVO) that extracts fine-grained time and value offsets between input and output signals of TI. Using ETVO, we present two quantitative metrics for TI -- Effective Delay-Derivative (EDD) and Effective Root Mean Square Error. Through rigorous experiments conducted on a realistic TI setup, we demonstrate the potential of the proposed metrics to precisely characterize TI interactions.
The Internet has made several giant leaps over the years, from a fixed to a mobile Internet, then to the Internet of Things, and now to a Tactile Internet. The Tactile Internet goes far beyond data, audio and video delivery over fixed and mobile networks, and even beyond allowing communication and collaboration among things. It is expected to enable haptic communication and allow skill set delivery over networks. Some examples of potential applications are tele-surgery, vehicle fleets, augmented reality and industrial process automation. Several papers already cover many of the Tactile Interne…
Prior Internet designs encompassed the fixed, mobile and lately the things Internet. In a natural evolution to these, the notion of the Tactile Internet is emerging which allows one to transmit touch and actuation in real-time. With voice and data communications driving the designs of the current Internets, the Tactile Internet will enable haptic communications, which in turn will be a paradigm shift in how skills and labor are digitally delivered globally. Design efforts for both the Tactile Internet and the underlying haptic communications are in its infancy. The aim of this article is thus …
The term Tactile Internet broadly refers to a communication network which is capable of delivering control, touch, and sensing/actuation information in real-time. The Tactile Internet is currently a topic of interest for various standardization bodies. The emerging IEEE P1918.1 standards working group is focusing on defining a framework for the Tactile Internet. The main objective of this article is to present a reference architecture for the Tactile Internet based on the latest developments within the IEEE P1918.1 standard. The article provides an in-depth treatment of various architectural a…
Ultra-low latency and high reliability communications are the two defining characteristics of Tactile Internet (TI). Nevertheless, some TI applications would also require high data-rate transfer of audio-visual information to complement the haptic data. Using Millimeter wave (mmWave) communications is an attractive choice for high datarate TI applications due to the availability of large bandwidth in the mmWave bands. Moreover, mmWave radio access is also advantageous to attain the airinterface-diversity required for high reliability in TI systems as mmWave signal propagation significantly dif…
The Tactile Internet (TI) is an emerging technology next to the Internet of Things (IoT). It is a revolution to develop the smart cities, communities and cultures in the future. This technology will allow the real-time interaction between human and machines as well as machine-to-machine with the 1ms challenge to achieve in round trip latency. The term TI is defined by International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in August 2014. The TI provides fast, reliable, secure and available internet network that is the requirements of the smart cities in 5G. Tactile internet can develop the part of world …
Tactile Internet (TI) enables the omnipresence and exchange of tactile experiences across the global via the ultra-reliable and ultra-responsive connectivity. This article argues for coordinated multi-point (CoMP) enabled radio access network (RAN) slicing as an efficient solution that satisfies the stringent reliable and responsive connectivity requirements for supporting tactile applications. This article presents the emerging challenges when accommodating CoMP-enabled RAN slicing in the TI ecosystem and expounds the functional split of CoMP-enabled RAN. Besides, this article elaborates on t…
The Tactile Internet (TI) is one of the next generation wireless network services with end to end (E2E) delay as low as 1~ms. Since this ultra low E2E delay cannot be met in the current 4G network architecture, it is necessary to investigate this service in the next generation wireless network by considering new technologies such as network function virtualization (NFV). On the other hand, given the importance of E2E delay in the TI service, it is crucial to consider the delay of all parts of the network, including the radio access part and the NFV core part. In this paper, for the first time,…
From virtual reality and telepresence, to augmented reality, holoportation, and remotely controlled robotics, these future network applications promise an unprecedented development for society, economics and culture by revolutionizing the way we live, learn, work and play. In order to deploy such futuristic applications and to cater to their performance requirements, recent trends stressed the need for the Tactile Internet, an Internet that, according to the International Telecommunication Union, combines ultra low latency with extremely high availability, reliability and security. Unfortunate…
We evolve a methodology and define a metric to evaluate Tactile Internet based Cyber-Physical Systems or Tactile Cyber-Physical Systems (TCPS). Towards this goal, we adopt the step response analysis, a well-known control-theoretic method. The adoption includes replacing the human operator (or master) with a controller with known characteristics and analyzing its response to slave side step disturbances. The resulting step response curves demonstrate that the \textit{Quality of Control} (QoC) metric is sensitive to control loop instabilities and serves as a good indicator of cybersickness exper…
Tactile Internet (TI) is envisioned to create a paradigm shift from the content-oriented communications to steer/control-based communications by enabling real-time transmission of haptic information (i.e., touch, actuation, motion, vibration, surface texture) over Internet in addition to the conventional audiovisual and data traffics. This emerging TI technology is expected to create numerous opportunities for technology markets in a wide variety of applications ranging from teleoperation systems and AR/VR to automotive safety and eHealthcare towards addressing the complex problems of human so…
With the emergence of Cloud-RAN as one of the dominant architectural solutions for next-generation mobile networks, the reliability and latency on the fronthaul (FH) segment become critical performance metrics for applications such as the Tactile Internet. Ensuring FH performance is further complicated by the switch from point-to-point dedicated FH links to packet-based multi-hop FH networks. This change is largely justified by the fact that packet-based fronthauling allows the deployment of FH networks on the existing Ethernet infrastructure. This paper proposes to improve reliability and lat…
Ultra-low latency is the most important requirement of the Tactile Internet (TI), which is one of the proposed services for the next-generation wireless network (NGWN), e.g., fifth generation (5G) network. In this paper, a new queuing model for the TI is proposed for the cloud radio access network (CRAN) architecture of the NGWN by applying power domain non-orthogonal multiple access (PD-NOMA) technology. In this model, we consider both the radio remote head (RRH) and baseband processing unit (BBU) queuing delays for each end-to-end (E2E) connection between a pair of tactile users. In our setu…
In this paper, a new queuing model for the Tactile Internet (TI) is proposed for the cloud radio access network (C-RAN) architecture of the next generation wireless networks, e.g., 5G, assisted via orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) technology. This model includes both the radio remote head (RRH) and baseband processing unit (BBU) queuing delays and reliability for each end to end (E2E) connection between each pair of tactile users. For this setup, with the aim to minimize the transmit power of users subject to guaranteeing tolerable delay of users, and fronthaul and access …
Tactile Internet is an emerging concept that focuses on supporting high-fidelity, ultra-responsive, and widely available human-to-machine interactions. To reduce the transmission latency and alleviate Internet congestion, fog computing has been advocated as an important component of the Tactile Internet. In this paper, we focus on energy-efficient design of fog computing networks that support low-latency Tactile Internet applications. We investigate two performance metrics: Service response time of end-users and power usage efficiency of fog nodes. We quantify the fundamental tradeoff between …
The next frontier in communications is teleoperation -- manipulation and control of remote environments with feedback. Compared to conventional networked applications, teleoperation poses widely different requirements, ultra-low latency (ULL) is primary. Realizing ULL communication demands significant redesign of conventional networking techniques, and the network infrastructure envisioned for achieving this is termed as Tactile Internet (TI). The design of the network infrastructure and meaningful performance metrics are crucial for seamless TI communication. However, existing performance met…
The world had witnessed several generations of the Internet. Starting with the Fixed Internet, then the Mobile Internet, scientists now focus on many types of research related to the "Thing" Internet (or Internet of Things). The question is "what is the next Internet generation after the Thing Internet?" This paper envisions about the Tactile Internet which could be the next Internet generation in the near future. The paper will introduce what is the tactile internet, why it could be the next future Internet, as well as the impact and its application in the future society. Furthermore, some ch…
In order to improve future network performance, this paper proposes scalable intelligence-enabled networking (SIEN) with eliminating traffic redundancy for audio-visual-tactile Internet in 5G scenarios such as enhanced mobile broadband, ultra-reliable and low latency communication, and massive machine-type communication. The SIEN consists of an intelligent management plane (ImP), an intelligence-enabled plane (IeP), a control plane and a user plane. For the ImP, the containers with decision execution are constructed by a novel graph algorithm to organize objects such as network elements and re…
Tactile Internet often requires (i) the ultra-reliable and ultra-responsive network connection and (ii) the proactive and intelligent actuation at edge devices. A promising approach to address these two requirements is to enable mobile edge devices to share their communication, computation, and caching (3C) resources via device-to-device (D2D) connections. In this paper, we propose a general 3C resource sharing framework, which includes many existing 1C/2C sharing models in the literature as special cases. Comparing with 1C/2C models, the proposed 3C framework can further improve the resource …
In recent years, 5G is widely used in parallel with IoT networks to enable massive data connectivity and exchange with ultra-reliable and low latency communication (URLLC) services. The internet requirements from user's perspective have shifted from simple human to human interactions to different communication paradigms and information-centric networking (ICN). ICN distributes the content among the users based on their trending requests. ICN is responsible not only for the routing and caching but also for naming the network's content. ICN considers several parameters such as cache-hit ratio, c…
Human sensing information such as audio (hearing) and visual (sight) or a combination thereof audiovisual are transferred over communication networks. Yet interacting sense of touch (haptic) and particularly the kinaesthetic (muscular movement) component has much stricter end-to-end latency communication requirements between tactile ends. The statements in this paper, to enable bi-directional haptic control, indeed follow the widely accepted understanding that edge computing is a key driver behind Tactile Internet aiming to bring control and user plane services closer to where they are needed.…
Future fully interconnected virtual reality (VR) systems and the Tactile Internet diminish the boundary between virtual (online) and real (offline) worlds, while extending the digital and physical capabilities of humans via edge computing and teleoperated robots, respectively. In this paper, we focus on the Internet of No Things as an extension of immersive VR from virtual to real environments, where human-intended Internet services - either digital or physical - appear when needed and disappear when not needed. We first introduce the concept of integrated online-to-offline (O2O) communication…
Robotic telesurgery has a potential to provide extreme and urgent health care services and bring unprecedented opportunities to deliver highly specialized skills globally. It has a significant societal impact and is regarded as one of the appealing use cases of Tactile Internet and 5G applications. However, the performance of robotic telesurgery largely depends on the network performance in terms of latency, jitter and packet loss, especially when telesurgical system is equipped with haptic feedback. This imposes significant challenges to design a reliable and secure but cost-effective communi…
Touch enabled sensation and actuation is expected to be one of the most promising, straightforward and important uses of the next generation communication networks. In B5G/6G need for low latency, the infrastructure should be reconfigurable and intelligent to be able to work in real time and interoperable with the existing wireless network. It has a drastic impact on the society due to its high precision, accuracy, reliability and efficiency and the ability to connect a user from far away or remote areas. Such a touch-enabled interaction is primarily concerned with the real time transmission o…
Cellular Internet of Things (IoT) is considered as de facto paradigm to improve the communication and computation systems. Cellular IoT connects massive number of physical and virtual objects to the Internet using cellular networks. The latest generation of cellular networks, e.g. fifth-generation (5G), use evolutionary and revolutionary technologies to notably improve the performance of wireless networks. However, given the envisioned new use-cases, e.g., holographic communication, and the ever-increasing deployment of massive smart-physical end-devices in IoT, the volume of network traffic h…
The world is moving toward globalization rapidly. Everybody has easy access to information with the spread of Internet technology. Businesses are growing beyond national borders. Internationalization affects every aspect of life. In this scenario, by dispersing functions and tasks across organizational borders, time and space, global organizations have higher requirements for collaboration. In order to allow decision-makers and knowledge workers, situated at different times and spaces, to work more efficiently, collaborative technologies are needed. In this paper, we give an overview of potent…
High-fidelity, real-time interactive applications are envisioned with the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and tactile Internet by means of ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC). Exploiting time diversity for fulfilling the URLLC requirements in an energy efficient manner is a challenging task due to the nontrivial interplay among packet size, retransmission rounds and delay, and transmit power. In this paper, we study the fundamental energy-latency tradeoff in URLLC systems employing incremental redundancy (IR) hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ). We cast the average e…
The next frontier for immersive applications is enabling sentience over the Internet. Tactile Internet (TI) envisages transporting skills by providing Ultra-Low Latency (ULL) communications for transporting touch senses. In this work, we focus our study on the first/last mile communication, where the future generation WiFi-7 is pitched as the front-runner for ULL applications. We discuss a few candidate features of WiFi-7 and highlight its major pitfalls with respect to ULL communication. Further, through a specific implementation of WiFi-7 (vanilla WiFi-7) in our custom simulator, we demonstr…
