Utilizing Massive MIMO for the Tactile Internet: Advantages and Trade-Offs

Controlling robots in real-time over a wireless interface present fundamental challenges for forthcoming fifth generation wireless networks. Mission critical real-time applications such as telesurgery over the tactile Internet require a communication link that is both ultra-reliable and low-latency, and that simultaneously serving multiple devices and applications. Wireless performance requirements for these applications surpass the capabilities of current wireless cellular standards. The prevailing ambitions for the fifth generation wireless specifications go beyond higher throughput and embrace the wireless performance demands of mission critical real-time applications in robotics and the Internet of Things. To accommodate these demands, changes have to be made across all layers of the wireless infrastructure. The fifth generation wireless standards are far from finalized but massive Multiple-Input Multiple- Output has surfaced as a strong radio access technology candidate and has great potential to cope with all these stringent requirements. In this paper, we investigate how Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Communication with massive MIMO can be achieved for bilateral teleoperation, an integral part of the tactile Internet. We conclude through simulation what the performance bounds are for massive MIMO and thus how to configure such a system for near deterministic latency and what the inherit trade-offs are.