Leveraging Intelligent Computation Offloading with Fog/Edge Computing for Tactile Internet: Advantages and Limitations

[EN] With the recent advancement in wireless communication and networks, we are at the doorstep of the Tactile Internet. The Tactile Internet aims to enable the skill delivery and thereafter democratize the specialized skills for many emerging applications (e.g., remote medical, industrial machinery, remote robotics, autonomous driving). In this article, we start with the motivation of applying intelligent edge computing for computation offloading in the Tactile Internet. Afterward, we outline the main research challenges to leverage edge intelligence at the master, network, and controlled domain of the Tactile Internet. The key research challenges in the Tactile Internet lie in its stringent requirements such as ultra-low latency, ultra-high reliability, and almost zero service outage. We also discuss major entities in intelligent edge computing and their role in the Tactile Internet. Finally, several potential research challenges in edge intelligence for the Tactile Internet are highlighted.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61901128, and Agile Edge Intelligence for Delay Sensitive IoT (AgilE-IoT) project (Grant No. 9131-00119B) of Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF).Mukherjee, M.; Guo, M.; Lloret, J.; Zhang, Q. (2020). Leveraging Intelligent Computation Offloading with Fog/Edge Computing for Tactile Internet: Advantages and Limitations. IEEE Network. 34(5):322-329. https://doi.org/10.1109/MNET.001.200000432232934

Towards Tactile Internet in Beyond 5G Era: Recent Advances, Current Issues and Future Directions

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, also considered as the next evolution phase of Internet of Things (IoT), is expected to create numerous opportunities for technology markets in a wide variety of applications ranging from teleoperation systems and Augmented/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) to automotive safety and eHealthcare towards addressing the complex problems of human society. However, the realization of TI over wireless media in the upcoming Fifth Generation (5G) and beyond networks creates various non-conventional communication challenges and stringent requirements in terms of ultra-low latency, ultra-high reliability, high data-rate connectivity, resource allocation, multiple access and quality-latency-rate tradeoff. To this end, this paper aims to provide a holistic view on wireless TI along with a thorough review of the existing state-of-the-art, to identify and analyze the involved technical issues, to highlight potential solutions and to propose future research directions. First, starting with the vision of TI and recent advances and a review of related survey/overview articles, we present a generalized framework for wireless TI in the Beyond 5G Era including a TI architecture, the main technical requirements, the key application areas and potential enabling technologies. Subsequently, we provide a comprehensive review of the existing TI works by broadly categorizing them into three main paradigms; namely, haptic communications, wireless AR/VR, and autonomous, intelligent and cooperative mobility systems. Next, potential enabling technologies across physical/Medium Access Control (MAC) and network layers are identified and discussed in detail. Also, security and privacy issues of TI applications are discussed along with some promising enablers. Finally, we present some open research challenges and recommend promising future research directions

A Comprehensive Survey of the Tactile Internet: State of the art and Research Directions

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 Internet-related concepts and technologies, such as haptic codecs, applications, and supporting technologies. However, none of them offers a comprehensive survey of the Tactile Internet, including its architectures and algorithms. Furthermore, none of them provides a systematic and critical review of the existing solutions. To address these lacunae, we provide a comprehensive survey of the architectures and algorithms proposed to date for the Tactile Internet. In addition, we critically review them using a well-defined set of requirements and discuss some of the lessons learned as well as the most promising research directions

Dynamic communication QoS design for real-time wireless control systems

In the coming fifth-generation (5G) cellular networks, ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) is treated as an indispensable service to enable real-time wireless control systems. However, the extremely high quality-of-service (QoS) in URLLC causes significant wireless resource consumption. Moreover, to obtain good control performance may not always require extremely high communication QoS. In this paper, we propose a communication-control co-design scheme to reduce wireless resource consumption, where we obtain a dynamic communication QoS design method to reduce the energy consumption by jointly using extremely high QoS and a relatively low QoS. In this scheme, we first explore the control process served by different communication QoS levels and find that the whole control process can be divided into two phases, where different QoS levels have their advantages in different phases. Then, we obtain a threshold to decide when the extremely high QoS or relatively low QoS should be provided by communications. Simulation results demonstrate that our method can effectively reduce communication energy consumption while maintaining good control performance