Capsule: All you need to know about Tactile Internet in a Nutshell

Abstract

Machine-to-machine and device-to-device communications are very common in the era of the Internet of things (IoT). In 5G-enabled IoT, massive machine type communication and enhanced Mobile broadband are two supporting protocols ensuring communication among a large number of devices. On the other side, for human-to-machine communication, end-to-end latency, resource availability, high reliability, and end-to-end security are the major hurdles for several applications deployed in different network domains. The above-mentioned issues require a unique solution to maintain Quality of Service and Quality of Experience for industry 4.0 based applications. Therefore, to mitigate the aforementioned issues, here, we present the Tactile Internet, a new technology with its various components in a nutshell. Existing proposals reveal that Tactile Internet can form the interactions between virtual objects and the real environment by maintaining 1ms latency, 99.999% availability, and end-to-end security. Hence, it works like middleware to meet out the ultra-reliable low latency requirements of future 5G-based applications. Moreover, the article provides the possible use cases for Tactile Internet and its usage. Finally, we evaluate the results of applications with Tactile Internet and LTE-A communication networks in the context of data access latency and connection density. Applications with Tactile Internet as a backbone network outperform the traditional LTE-A networks.