The long-term ambition of the Tactile Internet is to enable a democratization of skill, and how it is being delivered globally. An integral part of this is to be able to transmit touch in perceived real-time, which is enabled by suitable robotics and haptics equipment at the edges, along with an unprecedented communications network. The fifth generation (5G) mobile communications systems will underpin this emerging Internet at the wireless edge. This paper presents the most important technology concepts, which lay at the intersection of the larger Tactile Internet and the emerging 5G systems. The paper outlines the key technical requirements and architectural approaches for the Tactile Internet, pertaining to wireless access protocols, radio resource management aspects, next generation core networking capabilities, edge-cloud, and edge-AI capabilities. The paper also highlights the economic impact of the Tactile Internet as well as a major shift in business models for the traditional telecommunications ecosystem.

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5G-Enabled Tactile Internet

Cloud computing with its three key facets (i.e., IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) and its inherent advantages (e.g., elasticity and scalability) still faces several challenges. The distance between the cloud and the end devices might be an issue for latency-sensitive applications such as disaster management and content delivery applications. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) may also impose processing at locations where the cloud provider does not have data centers. Fog computing is a novel paradigm to address such issues. It enables provisioning resources and services outside the cloud, at the edge of the network, closer to end devices or eventually, at locations stipulated by SLAs. Fog computing is not a substitute for cloud computing but a powerful complement. It enables processing at the edge while still offering the possibility to interact with the cloud. This article presents a comprehensive survey on fog computing. It critically reviews the state of the art in the light of a concise set of evaluation criteria. We cover both the architectures and the algorithms that make fog systems. Challenges and research directions are also introduced. In addition, the lessons learned are reviewed and the prospects are discussed in terms of the key role fog is likely to play in emerging technologies such as Tactile Internet.

A Comprehensive Survey on Fog Computing: State-of-the-art and Research Challenges

Touch is currently seen as the modality that will complement audition and vision as a third media stream over the Internet in a variety of future haptic applications which will allow full immersion and that will, in many ways, impact society. Nevertheless, the high requirements of these applications demand networks which allow ultra-reliable and low-latency communication for the challenging task of applying the required quality of service for maintaining the user’s quality of experience at optimum levels. In this survey, we enlist, discuss, and evaluate methodologies and technologies of the necessary infrastructure for haptic communication. Furthermore, we focus on how the fifth generation of mobile networks will allow haptic applications to take life, in combination with the haptic data communication protocols, bilateral teleoperation control schemes and haptic data processing needed. Finally, we state the lessons learned throughout the surveyed research material along with the future challenges and infer our conclusions.

/pdf/toward-haptic-communications-over-the-5g-tactile-internet-1ye12g467d.pdf

Toward Haptic Communications Over the 5G Tactile Internet

The Tactile Internet presently constitutes a vision of an Internet over which, in addition to current communications modalities, a sense of touch can be transported. In that case, people would no longer need to be physically near the systems they operate, but could control them remotely. The main problem that needs to be solved to realize the Tactile Internet is summarized by the “1 ms challenge.” If the response time of a system is below 1 ms, the end-user will not be able to tell the difference between controlling a system locally or from another location. This paper offers a summary of the requirements for haptic communications, followed by an overview of challenges in realizing the Tactile Internet. In addition, possible solutions to these challenges are proposed and discussed. For example, the development of the fifth generation mobile communication networks will provide a good foundation upon which a Tactile Internet could be built. This paper also describes the design of a modular testbed needed for testing of a wide variety of haptic system applications.

/pdf/challenges-in-haptic-communications-over-the-tactile-1996sbtfn8.pdf

Challenges in Haptic Communications Over the Tactile Internet

The past decade has witnessed how audio-visual communication has shaped the way humans interact with or through technical systems. In contemporary times, the potential of haptic communication has been recognized as being compelling to further augment human-to-human and human-to-machine interaction. In the context of immersive communication, video and audio compression are considered key enabling technologies for high-quality interaction. In contrast, the compression of haptic data is a field of research that is still relatively young and not fully explored. This disregards the fact that we as humans rely heavily on the haptic modality to interact with our environment. True immersion into a distant environment and efficient collaboration between multiple participants both require the ability to physically interact with objects in the remote environment. With recent advances in virtual reality, man-machine interaction, telerobotics, telepresence, and teleaction, haptic communication is proving instrumental in enabling many novel applications. The goal of this overview article is to summarize the state of the art and the challenges of haptic data compression and communication for telepresence and teleaction.

https://mediatum.ub.tum.de/doc/1116641/file.pdf

Haptic Data Compression and Communication

This paper introduces a novel generic method aimed at predicting motion and force information in haptic media. An autoregressive (AR) model is presented for the prediction of both, haptic movement and force. The conditional maximum likelihood technique is utilized in order to accurately estimate the adaptive coefficients of the AR model. Furthermore, the incorporation of concepts from haptic perceptibility, i.e. the just noticeable difference (JND), has been demonstrated to optimize the suggested algorithm, while preserving the immersiveness of the haptic-enabled environment. The proposed technique has also proved to provide accurate prediction results for non-linear haptic movement and force information while simultaneously remaining computationally efficient.

Motion and Force Prediction in Haptic Media

In this paper, a novel haptic data reduction and compression technique to reduce haptic data traffic in networked haptic tele-mentoring systems is presented. The suggested method follows a two-step procedure: (1) haptic data packets are not transmitted when they can be predicted within a predefined tolerable error; otherwise, (2) data packets are compressed prior to transmission. The prediction technique relies on the least-squares method. Knowledge from human haptic perception is incorporated into the architecture to assess the perceptual quality of the prediction results. Packet-payload compression is performed using uniform quantization and adaptive Golomb-Rice codes. The preliminary experimental results demonstrate the algorithm's effectiveness as great haptic data reduction and compression is achieved, while preserving the overall quality of the tele-mentoring environment.

X. Shen

Papers

Motion and Force Prediction in Haptic Media

Prediction-based Haptic Data Reduction and Compression in Tele-Mentoring Systems