EdgeP4: In-Network Edge Intelligence for a Tactile Cyber-Physical System Testbed Across Cities

Tactile Internet based operations, e.g., telesurgery, rely on the human operator for end-to-end closed loop control to achieve accuracy. While feedback and control are subject to network latency and packet loss, critical operations such as pose correction, fiducial marking, tremor reduction, etc. are tasks that should be carried out automatically and thus dispensing with these feedback signals from traversing the network to the other end. We design two edge intelligence algorithms hosted at P4 programmable end switches placed 400 km apart. These algorithms locally compute and command corrective signals. We implement these algorithms entirely on data plane on Netronome Agilio SmartNICs. “pose correction” is placed at the edge switch connected to an industrial robot gripping a tool. The round trip between transmitting force sensor array readings to the edge switch and receiving correct tip coordinates at the robot is shown to be less than 100µs. “tremor suppression” is placed at the edge switch connected to the operator. It suppresses physiological tremors, which improves the application's performance and also reduces the network load up to 99.9%. Our EdgeP4 framework allows edge intelligence modules to seamlessly switch between the algorithms based on the tasks being executed by devices connected to their ports.