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.