This book attempts to provide an extensive overview on the Tactile Internet paradigm, which is considered to be the focus of interest around which all the cutting-edge technologies are centered. This is due to its wide applications and use cases that would change our lifestyle. This book is purposely written to appeal to a broad audience and to be of value to anyone who is interested in the Tactile Internet. The audience can be in any domain of computer science, communication and networking. The aim of this book is to offer comprehensive coverage of current state-of-the-art theoretical and technological aspects of the Tactile Internet. The presentation starts from basic principles and proceeds smoothly to more advanced topics. The schemes provided are developed and oriented in the context of very actual closed standards, i.e. IEEE 1918.1.

Organization of this book

This book is organized to follow a methodology of writing depending on how the Tactile Internet is tackled based on the level of difficulty that the audience can face while reading. Hence, we preferred to begin this book with a brief introduction of the tactile concept and its relationship with the Tactile Internet paradigm through cyber-physical systems in Chapter 1. Then, we introduce the architecture of the Tactile Internet from a technical point of view relying mainly on the IEEE 1918.1 standard in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 explains how the success of Tactile Internet deployment relies on different communications technologies, the concept of virtualization and the centralization of intelligence in some parts of the paradigm. These are called key enablers, which will decide the level of success of the Tactile Internet and its use cases. Chapter 4 tackles the 6th Generation of wireless network and its role in boosting the Tactile Internet by adding more intelligence at different levels of the paradigm.

In Chapter 5, IoT technology is reviewed and analyzed, emphasizing its architecture and communication protocols to prepare a background for comparison with the Tactile Internet, both the differences and similarities between them. This chapter attempts to clarify whether the Tactile Internet is an evolution of the IoT or a completely different paradigm. The Internet of Everything (IoE) is also introduced. Its components and differences with the IoT are explained. Later, in Chapter 6, a historical review of telerobotic, teleoperation and telepresence is presented before entering into a detailed explanation of the components and different architectures of teleoperation systems. The two-port system analysis is applied to assess the stability and transparency, which are the performance metrics of the system. A model of a discrete architecture of the teleoperation system is given. The use of the Internet as the medium network for the teleoperation system is presented along with a session initiation protocol to establish a teleoperation session. Finally, a use case of a teleoperation system over the Internet, using two commercial components, is presented. The characteristics and transmission of the haptic data over the Internet are presented in Chapter 7. In this chapter, the perception of haptics in robots is explained: the material, shape and pose recognition. A list of sensor devices for haptic information is given along with their working principles. These are used to build haptic interfaces, where some of the commercial haptic interfaces are also listed. Methods of compression of haptic information for better utilization of the transmission bandwidth is also given in this chapter. The transport protocols of the compressed information are then listed with their properties and conveniences for haptic information communication.

Chapter 8 introduces Wireless Networked Robots and then maps their characteristics, scenarios, and traffic types to the Tactile Internet use cases.

Chapter 9 studies the performance of a teleoperation case study that supports the IEEE 1918.1 architecture while taking 5G as a main transport network. The teleoperation case study investigated the quality of service guarantee for the mission-critical application that requires stringent end-to-end delay. Chapter 10 determines how delay plays a big role in the stability of different types of Tactile Internet applications with the ultra-low latency requirement. It discusses the factors that have an impact on the latency and the recent research work on this subject.

May 2021