Latency Reduction Through Parallel Compression and Transmission in Tactile Internet Applications

Tactile Internet (TI) facilitates virtual immersion in a remote environment by transferring the sense of touch, thereby posing stringent latency requirements. It is challenging to meet those requirements, especially for large data volumes and in the uplink. This work presents a latency reduction scheme for uplink data transmission while ensuring high reliability based on considerations of the timing contribution from both compression and communication. The approach is termed Parallel Compression and Transmission (PCT) and the key idea is to send part of the data uncompressed while simultaneously compressing the remaining data. This is formulated into a non-convex optimization problem that minimizes the latency under a statistical constraint on reliability. The results show that the proposed approach can lead to latency reduction of more than 30% under a reliability level of 99% in the considered setup, outlining the promise of the concept of parallel compression and computation towards latency reduction.