Lyapunov-Optimized 5G-Sliced Communications for Telerobotic Applications

In the realm of 5G wireless, Tactile Internet based applications are envisioned to be supported with the ultra-reliable low-latency communications. Remote telerobotic applications are thus becoming more feasible in mission-critical and safety-critical operations. However, the variations in the outer-loop control over wireless can potentially cause drift in operations, thus disrupting the mission and sometimes can be fatal. Hence, jointly optimizing the communication and control for the telerobotic applications is very important. However, in practical scenarios, the telerobotic applications share the wireless channel with other users, many of which are data rate-intensive. To mitigate this problem, we propose to use 5G network slicing to serve the two kinds of users and jointly optimize their data rates to maximize the performance of the high-datarate users while also minimizing the operational errors in telerobotic applications. We formulate this problem with Lyapunov optimization and conducted simulation experiments with practical parameter values. Our results show the advantage of our solution in terms of isolation among the slices and also satisfying the requirements of different applications in each slice.