Tactile Internet Applications Research Articles

SlowR50-SA: A Self-Attention Enhanced Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition Model for Tactile Internet Applications

Emotion recognition from facial expressions is a challenging task due to the subtle and nuanced nature of facial expressions. Within the framework of Tactile Internet (TI), the integration of this technology has the capacity to completely transform real-time user interactions, by delivering customized emotional input. The influence of this technology is far-reaching, as it may be used in immersive virtual reality interactions and remote tele-care applications to identify emotional states in patients. In this paper, a novel emotion recognition algorithm is presented that integrates a Self-Attention (SA) module into the SlowR50 backbone (SlowR50-SA). The experiments on the DFEW and FERV39K datasets demonstrate that the proposed model achieves good performance in terms of both Unweighted Average Recall (UAR) and Weighted Average Recall (WAR) metrics, achieving a UAR (WAR) of 57.09% (69.87%) on the DFEW dataset, and UAR (WAR) of 39.48% (49.34%) on the FERV39K dataset. Notably, SlowR50-SA operates with only eight frames of input at low temporal resolution, highlighting its efficiency. Furthermore, the algorithm has the potential to be integrated into Tactile Internet applications, where it can be used to enhance the user experience by providing real-time emotion feedback. SlowR50-SA can also be used to enhance virtual reality experiences by providing personalized haptic feedback based on the user’s emotional state. It can also be used in remote tele-care applications to detect signs of stress, anxiety, or depression in patients.

Verification of a multi-connectivity protocol for Tactile Internet applications

Tactile Internet refers to a network that enables real-time, high-reliability haptic communication and control between humans, machines, and objects over the Internet. Tactile Internet applications include the remote control of drones, cars or industrial tele-operation. In this context, the Multi-connection Tactile Internet Protocol (MTIP) is a novel multipath transport protocol designed to support the requirements of Tactile Internet applications in large, private mobile networks. The objective of this paper is to analyze and verify the correctness and performance of the MTIP protocol to ensure that the protocol functions correctly under different network scenarios and it is ready to meet the performance requirements of Tactile Internet applications. For that purpose, a two-step approach is employed to analyze and verify MTIP. In the first step, a formal model of MTIP is developed using timed automata and the uppaal tool is utilized to verify correctness properties represented as temporal formulas. In the second step, the performance of the protocol is analyzed using the statistical model checking features of uppaal (uppaalsmc) in scenarios that are difficult and expensive to reproduce in a real network. The results indicate that MTIP’s model meets the specified temporal properties, and the performance evaluation showcases the potential and trade-off of using multiple paths to enhance the communication. Based on the analysis and verification results, the paper emphasizes the readiness of MTIP for real-world deployment and highlights its potential benefits for enhancing the performance of Tactile Internet applications.

Smart Glove With Fully Integrated Textile Sensors and Wireless Sensor Frontend for the Tactile Internet

In this letter, we present a smart glove for Tactile Internet applications. The individual finger motions are measured via resistive strain sensors. The strain sensors are directly integrated with the textile glove and are produced in an automated process. The sensor glove is integrated with sensor conditioning, controller, wireless frontend, and battery. We investigate the measured sensor data for a variety of gestures, demonstrating the good quality of the data allowing for easy and low-energy gesture recognition.

An Exploration and Impact Analysis of Fog Computing in Healthcare and Tactile Internet Applications

An Exploration and Impact Analysis of Fog Computing in Healthcare and Tactile Internet Applications

FPGA Applied to Latency Reduction for the Tactile Internet.

Tactile internet applications allow robotic devices to be remotely controlled over a communication medium with an unnoticeable time delay. In bilateral communication, the acceptable round trip latency is usually 1 ms up to 10 ms, depending on the application requirements. The communication network is estimated to generate 70% of the total latency, and master and slave devices produce the remaining 30%. Thus, this paper proposes a strategy to reduce 30% of the total latency produced by such devices. The strategy is to use FPGAs to minimize the execution time of device-associated algorithms. With this in mind, this work presents a new hardware reference model for modules that implement nonlinear positioning and force calculations and a tactile system formed by two robotic manipulators. In addition to presenting the implementation details, simulations and experimental tests are performed in order to validate the hardware proposed model. Results associated with the FPGA sampling rate, throughput, latency, and post-synthesis occupancy area are analyzed.

Resilient Control Plane Design for Virtualized 6G Core Networks

With the advent of 6G and its mission-critical and tactile Internet applications running in a virtualized environment on the same physical infrastructure, even the shortest service disruptions have severe consequences for thousands of users. Therefore, the network hypervisors, which enable such virtualization, should tolerate failures or be able to adapt to sudden traffic fluctuations instantaneously, i.e., should be well-prepared for such unpredictable environmental changes. In this paper, we propose a latency-aware dual hypervisor placement and control path design method, which protects against single-link and hypervisor failures and is ready for unknown future changes. We prove that finding the minimum number of hypervisors is not only NP-hard, but also hard to approximate. We propose optimal and heuristic algorithms to solve the problem. We conduct thorough simulations to demonstrate the efficiency of our method on real-world optical topologies, and show that with an appropriately selected representative set of possible future requests, we are not only able to approach the maximum possible acceptance ratio but also able to mitigate the need of frequent hypervisor migrations for most realistic latency constraints.

Tactile Near-Sensor Analogue Computing for Ultrafast Responsive Artificial Skin.

Ultrafast artificial skin enables unprecedented tactile internet applications in prosthetics, robotics, and human-machine interactions. However, current artificial skin systems that rely on front-end interface electronics typically perform redundant data transfer and analogue-to-digital conversions for decision-making, causing long latency (milliseconds). Here, a near-sensor analogue computing system based on a flexible memristor array for artificial skin applications is reported. This system, which seamlessly integrates a tactile sensor array with a flexible hafnium oxide memristor array, can simultaneously sense and compute raw multiple analogue pressure signals without interface electronics. As a proof-of-concept, the system is used for real-time noise reduction and edge detection of tactile stimuli. One sensing-computing operation of this system takes about 400ns and consumes on average 1000 times less power than a conventional interface electronic system. The results demonstrate that near-sensor analogue computing offers an ultrafast and energy-efficient route to large-scale artificial skin systems.

Sensing Performance of Multi-Channel RFID-Based Finger Augmentation Devices for Tactile Internet

Radiofrequency finger augmentation devices (R-FADs) are a recently introduced class of epidermal radiofrequency identification (RFID) sensor-tags attached to the fingers, communicating with a body-worn reader. These devices are promising candidates to enable Tactile Internet (TI) applications in the short term. R-FAD based on auto-tuning RFID microchips can be used as dielectric probes for the material of touched objects. However, due to the nearly unpredictable intrinsic variability of finger-object interaction, a single sensorized finger (single-channel device) is not enough to guarantee reliable data sampling. These limitations can be overcome by exploiting a multi-channel R-FAD sensorizing multiple fingers of the hand. In this paper, the dielectric-sensing performance of a multi-channel R-FAD, composed of sensors encapsulated into soft elastomers, is numerically and experimentally characterized, involving a set of volunteers. The inter-sensor coupling is negligible, thus enabling simultaneous independent dielectric measurements. The multi-sensor configuration allows for 100% reliability of the on-hand communication link for touched objects in a wide range of permittivity. Experiments moreover demonstrate that multi-channel measurements can halve the measurement uncertainty of the single-channel case. The achievable precision is suitable to discriminate among low-, medium-, and high-permittivity materials.

QoS Provisioning: Key Drivers and Enablers Toward the Tactile Internet in Beyond 5G Era

The Tactile Internet has become a revolution for Internet technology, greatly improving the transmission of skill sets (audio, video, text, and haptics) over communication channels compared with traditional triple-play data (audio, video, text). It is a strong candidate to support next-generation delay-sensitive and loss-intolerant smart applications. However, stringent requirements for the Tactile Internet, including ultra-low latency, ultra-high reliability, high availability, and ultra-security, present critical challenges to ensure Quality of Service (QoS). Consequently, several approaches have been proposed to meet these QoS requirements. This article reviews QoS provisioning approaches for the Tactile Internet. First, we present key concepts for the fifth-generation and beyond technologies, Tactile Internet, and haptic communication. Second, we discuss the Tactile Internet use cases along with strict QoS requirements. Third, we classify existing solutions, including haptic codecs, control system designs, hybrid schemes, and intelligent prediction models; provide in-depth discussion regarding these approaches to improve QoS for the Tactile Internet applications; and investigate strengths and weaknesses for each proposed solution. Finally, we present open research challenges and discuss potential future research avenues to realize the Tactile Internet services.

A Case Study on the Deployment of a Tactile Internet Application in a Hybrid Cloud, Edge, and Mobile Ad Hoc Cloud Environment

The tactile Internet is the next step after the Internet of Things (IoT). It enables the steering and control of virtual and real objects through the Internet and requires a very low round trip latency. This article is devoted to a case study on the deployment of a tactile Internet application in a hybrid cloud, edge, and mobile <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">ad hoc</i> cloud environment. We deploy a remote phobia-treatment application as a set of components. Remote phobia treatment allows phobia patients to have therapy sessions under the guidance of an expert therapist located remotely, with patients and therapist sharing the same virtual reality (VR) environment. A three-layer architecture (cloud, edge, and mobile <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">ad hoc</i> cloud) is proposed for the deployment. A prototype is built with Microsoft Azure at the cloud layer, laptops at the edge layer, and smartphones at the mobile <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">ad hoc</i> cloud layer. End-users are equipped with an HTC VIVE headset for VR rendering and Gloveone gloves for haptic sensations rendering. Extensive performance measurements are made by varying the component deployment patterns as well as the distance between the therapist and patient. Our results demonstrate clearly that the addition of mobile <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">ad hoc</i> cloud to the edge and cloud does bring added value in terms of latency reduction when deploying tactile Internet applications.

Smart Cities of the Future as Cyber Physical Systems: Challenges and Enabling Technologies.

A smart city represents an improvement of today’s cities, both functionally and structurally, that strategically utilizes several smart factors, capitalizing on Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to increase the city’s sustainable growth and strengthen the city’s functions, while ensuring the citizens’ enhanced quality of life and health. Cities can be viewed as a microcosm of interconnected “objects” with which citizens interact daily, which represents an extremely interesting example of a cyber physical system (CPS), where the continuous monitoring of a city’s status occurs through sensors and processors applied within the real-world infrastructure. Each object in a city can be both the collector and distributor of information regarding mobility, energy consumption, air pollution as well as potentially offering cultural and tourist information. As a consequence, the cyber and real worlds are strongly linked and interdependent in a smart city. New services can be deployed when needed, and evaluation mechanisms can be set up to assess the health and success of a smart city. In particular, the objectives of creating ICT-enabled smart city environments target (but are not limited to) improved city services; optimized decision-making; the creation of smart urban infrastructures; the orchestration of cyber and physical resources; addressing challenging urban issues, such as environmental pollution, transportation management, energy usage and public health; the optimization of the use and benefits of next generation (5G and beyond) communication; the capitalization of social networks and their analysis; support for tactile internet applications; and the inspiration of urban citizens to improve their quality of life. However, the large scale deployment of cyber-physical-social systems faces a series of challenges and issues (e.g., energy efficiency requirements, architecture, protocol stack design, implementation, and security), which requires more smart sensing and computing methods as well as advanced networking and communications technologies to provide more pervasive cyber-physical-social services. In this paper, we discuss the challenges, the state-of-the-art, and the solutions to a set of currently unresolved key questions related to CPSs and smart cities.

RT-TelSurg: Real Time Telesurgery Using SDN, Fog, and Cloud as Infrastructures

This paper proposes a novel and efficient real time network architecture, named RT-TelSurg, for one of the most appealing tactile Internet applications, i.e., Telesurgery. In telesurgery, the patient’s vital signs and status and the required robotic commands during the surgery should be received on time. Otherwise, the life of the patient or the safety of the operation is endangered. Hence, transmitted packets should meet their respective relative deadlines. Software-defined networking is a relatively new architecture for computer and telecommunications networks in which the network control plane is separated from the data plane. One way to achieve real time telesurgery is to employ cloud and fog networks using SDN as infrastructure. By using a real time cloud controller in the SDN as the core and a fog controller on the edge of the network on the master (physician) side, one may satisfy the acceptable level of the timing constraints of the telesurgery. Accordingly, based on the presented architecture, we develop the statistical performance model of our proposed approach, RT-TelSurg. This statistical queuing theory model is designed for critical and non-critical states of the network. Based on these states, network resources are allocated to telesurgery data in both modes, and a computational bottleneck is detected. RT-TelSurg is evaluated according to real time and surgery efficiency parameters. The results show that the average deadline hit ratio is 98.2% in different conditions, which is quite acceptable for telesurgery applications.

Ensuring Reliability and Low Cost When Using a Parallel VNF Processing Approach to Embed Delay-Constrained Slices

Slices were introduced in 5G to enable the co-existence of applications with different requirements on a single infrastructure. Slices may be delay-constrained for mission-critical applications such as Tactile Internet applications. When delay-constrained slices are implemented as collections of virtual network function (VNF) chains, a key challenge is to place the VNFs and route the traffic through the chains to meet a strict delay constraint. Parallel VNF processing has been proposed as a promising approach. However, this approach increases the number of physical nodes in the chains, and thus decreases the reliability, which is also critical for Tactile Internet applications. Furthermore, the cost depends upon the specific VNF placement and traffic routing, as nodes and links are heterogeneous. This article tackles the issues of reliability and cost when embedding delay-constrained slices. We model the problem as an optimization problem that minimizes reliability degradation and cost while ensuring the strict delay constraint when a parallel VNF processing approach is used. Due to the complexity of the formulated problem, we also propose a Tabu search-based algorithm to find sub-optimal solutions. The results indicate that our proposed algorithm can significantly improve cost and reliability while meeting a strict delay constraint.

Scalable edge cloud platforms for IoT services

Nowadays, online applications are moving to the cloud, and for delay-sensitive ones, the cloud is being extended with edge/fog domains. Emerging cloud platforms that tightly integrate compute and network resources enable novel services, such as versatile IoT (Internet of Things), augmented reality or Tactile Internet applications. Virtual infrastructure managers (VIMs), network controllers and upper-level orchestrators are in charge of managing these distributed resources. A key and challenging task of these orchestrators is to find the proper placement for software components of the services. As the basic variant of the related theoretical problem (Virtual Network Embedding) is known to be NP-hard, heuristic solutions and approximations can be addressed. In this paper, we propose two architecture options together with proof-of-concept prototypes and corresponding embedding algorithms, which enable the provisioning of delay-sensitive IoT applications. On the one hand, we extend the VIM itself with network-awareness, typically not available in today's VIMs. On the other hand, we propose a multi-layer orchestration system where an orchestrator is added on top of VIMs and network controllers to integrate different resource domains. We argue that the large-scale performance and feasibility of the proposals can only be evaluated with complete prototypes, including all relevant components. Therefore, we implemented fully-fledged solutions and conducted large-scale experiments to reveal the scalability characteristics of both approaches. We found that our VIM extension can be a valid option for single-provider setups encompassing even 100 edge domains (Points of Presence equipped with multiple servers) and serving a few hundreds of customers. Whereas, our multi-layer orchestration system showed better scaling characteristics in a wider range of scenarios at the cost of a more complex control plane including additional entities and novel APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).

Traffic analysis for a parametric tactile codec

This article is devoted to the haptic communications types and methods. Haptic and tactile codecs were the research subject. As a research method authors engaged analysis of the current research re-sults in the area, research and development of the parametric tactile codec, as well as statistical analysis of the obtained tactile traffic. Core result. In this article authors provide a classification of the haptic interactions and tactile codes approaches. The other result of the work is a simple parametric tactile co-dec. Also, authors have found out that such type of codec created quite intensive flow of the packets of moderate size (500 bytes). Practical relevance of the result consists in the creation of the tactile co-dec that may be used for simple Tactile Internet applications. Besides that, obtained information about tactile traffic characteristics may be used to update forecasts of the global telecom traffic growth.

Simulation and measurement: Feasibility study of Tactile Internet applications for mmWave virtual reality

Numerous wearable technology companies have recently developed several head‐mounted display (HMD) products for virtual reality (VR) services. 5G wireless networks aim at providing high‐quality 3D multimedia services such as VR, augmented reality, and mixed reality. In this study, we examine the application of millimeter‐wave (mmWave) technology to realize low‐latency wireless communication between an HMD and its content server. However, the propagation characteristics of mmWave present several challenges such as the deafness, blockage, and beam alignment problems, and interference among content servers. In this study, we focus on an environment that provides VR services in the mmWave band and introduce existing techniques for addressing such challenges. In addition, we employ a commercialized IEEE 802.11ad VR dongle to measure the actual data rate of an mmWave VR application and identify the degree to which the performance deteriorates when the above problems occur. Finally, we verify the feasibility of the proposed solutions through a simulation of several VR scenarios in the mmWave band.

A Survey of End-to-End Solutions for Reliable Low-Latency Communications in 5G Networks

Very low latency and high reliability are two of the main requirements for new applications exploiting 5G networks. This is the case for the remote operation of robots or vehicles, the autonomous interaction of equipment in a factory, autonomous driving and tactile internet applications. Although the TCP/IP stack has been sufficient as the end-to-end solution for most of the history of the Internet, a number of surveys have appeared recently presenting many different methods for managing the end-to-end communication to meet the requirements of various technologies such as that of 5G networks. In this paper, we present a novel classification of the literature focused on new end-to-end solutions and the creation of services towards the support of low latency (1 ms) and high reliability (10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-9</sup> error rate) in current and future 5G networks. We specifically highlight how the proposals can be classified according to enabling technologies and the specific method used to achieve success in terms of the latency and reliability. The literature related to end-to-end solutions for reliable low-latency communications are organized according to three main topics: (i) end-to-end protocols that improve communication in terms of latency and reliability, (ii) functionality or technologies implemented on the network to support the current demands, and (iii) application programming interfaces that enhance the correct utilization of those protocols and additional technologies.

TACTILE INTERNET AND ITS APPLICATIONS

Based on 3GPP and ITU recommendations, Tactile Internet is one of the main applications of 5G communication networks (5G / IMT2020). Tactile Internet represents a new paradigm of telecommunications, which can support the transfer of Tactile sensations, which is the main application of this concept. The article analyzes Tactile Internet applications, implementation problems and approaches to their solution.

NETWORK LATENCY COMPENSATION APPROACHES FOR APPLICATIONS IN 2030 COMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS

Research subject. Communication network architecture 2030, delay compensation mechanisms. Objective. Consider the architecture of communication networks with intelligent edge computing, propose mechanisms for compensating network latency for tactile Internet applications based on predictive analytics. Core results. Scientific publications and specifications from open sources were analyzed, on tactile Internet topics, delay compensation mechanisms, intelligent boundary computing. A model of 2030 network architecture and a method of minimizing delay based on machine learning are proposed. Main conclusions. Modernization of the network architecture and software package will significantly increase the efficiency of communication networks, implement new models and methods of data processing, and will also have a significant impact on the digital economy.

Toward Dynamic HART-Centric Task Offloading over FiWi Infrastructures in the Tactile Internet Era

Contemporary resource constraint mobile devices face great challenges to execute computationally expensive tasks of low-latency Tactile Internet applications in a time-efficient manner. The so-called HART has emerged as a promising platform to address the burden of resource-limited mobile devices by allowing collaboration among humans, cloud agents, and robots for task execution. To facilitate a better task execution performance, dynamic task offloading onto suitable actors represents an important research problem, taking time-varying task, robot, and cloud agent properties into account. To tackle this open problem, this article first discusses characteristics, applications, and challenges of HART tasks. Next, this article investigates the problem of whether and where a HART task should be offloaded and presents a COTA strategy by taking task offloading gain and communication overhead into account. For HART-centric task offloading, this article leverages central cloud, mobile edge computing (MEC) servers, and multi-robot FiWi networks. Finally, numerical results are presented to examine the performance of the proposed COTA scheme over FiWi based Tactile Internet infrastructures.