One of the main design aspects of the Tactile Internet system is the 1 ms end-to-end latency, which is considered as being the main challenge with the system realization. Forced by recent development and capabilities of the fifth generation (5G) cellular system, the Tactile Internet will become a real. One way to overcome the 1 ms latency is to employ a centralized controller in the core of the network with a global knowledge of the system, together with the concept of network function virtualization (NFV). This is the idea behind the software defined networking (SDN). This paper introduces a Tactile Internet system structure, which employs SDN in the core of the cellular network and mobile edge computing (MEC) in multi-levels. The work is mainly concerned with the structure of the core network. The system is simulated over a reliable environment and introduces a round trip latency of orders of 1 ms. This can be interpreted by the reduction of intermediate nodes that are involved in the communication process.
Enabling haptic communication as well as voice and data over the future 5G cellular system has become a demand. Tactile Internet is one of the main use cases of the 5G system that will allow the transfer of haptic communications in real time. Latency, availability, reliability, and security are the main design challenges of the tactile Internet system and haptic based bilateral teleoperation systems. An end-to-end latency of 1 ms remains the main challenge toward tactile Internet system realization, not only for the processing and coding delays but mainly for the limitations of light. In this work, we analyze the key solutions to overcome the light limitations and enable the tactile Internet over any distances with the required latency. Building a virtual model or model mediated for the remote environment at the edge cloud unit near to the end user is the main solution. By means of AI, the virtual model can predict the behavior of the remote environment and thus, the end user can interact with the virtual environment with a high system experience. This literature review covers the existing work of the model mediated bilateral teleoperated systems and discusses its availability for the tactile Internet system. Furthermore, the security issues of tactile Internet system and the effect of model mediated system on the required security level of tactile Internet applications are discussed. Finally, a structure for the tactile Internet system, with the deployment of model mediation, is suggested.
1 January 2016 in Communications in Computer and Information Science