The tactile internet: vision, recent progress, and open challenges

The advent of commercially available remote-presence robots may be the precursor of an age of technological convergence, where important tasks of our everyday life will be increasingly done by robots. A very low roundtrip latency in conjunction with ultra-high reliability and essentially guaranteed availability for control communications has the potential to move today’s mobile broadband experience into the new world of the Tactile Internet for a race with (rather than against) machines. To facilitate a better understanding of the Tactile Internet, this article first elaborates on the commonalities and subtle differences between the Tactile Internet and the Internet of Things and 5G vision. After briefly reviewing its anticipated impact on society and infrastructure requirements, we then provide an up-to-date survey of recent progress and enabling technologies proposed for the Tactile Internet. Given that scaling up research in the area of future wired and wireless access networks will be essential for the Tactile Internet, we pay particular attention to the latency and reliability performance gains of fiber-wireless (FiWi) enhanced LTE-Advanced heterogeneous networks and their role for emerging cloudlets, mobile-edge computing, and cloud robotics. Finally, we conclude by outlining remaining open challenges for the Tactile Internet.