Enabling Virtual Reality for the Tactile Internet: Hurdles and Opportunities

The Tactile Internet envisions the real-time, full-fledged control of remote infrastructures by means of tactile sensors (haptics) and aided by audiovisual immersive inputs. End-to-end delays of at most 5 ms (minimum detectable by the human eye) and ultra-high-speed transmissions will be needed by services such as telehealth or Industry 4.0. To comply with these requirements, both networks and applications need to be dramatically improved. On the one hand, in the last years a massive effort is being put onto improving the current network infrastructures. Examples of this are the 5G paradigm or the advances on mechanisms of network precision control using network slicing, Software-defined networking solutions or novel service oriented protocols. On the other hand, Virtual Reality (VR) video streaming, which is the best-suited technology to provide the immersive visual feed of the Tactile Internet, is still far from the envisioned levels of real-timeliness and quality. The aim of this paper is to pinpoint the open challenges to enable VR video streaming technologies for the Tactile Internet. This paper first provides a thorough analysis of the state-of-the-art on VR video streaming technologies both, theoretically and by means of an experimental demonstrator. Based on this, we present the different research areas and key challenges within. In addition, possible solutions and research directions are introduced. We believe this work provides the means to open new opportunities for research not only within the challenging VR arena, but also in the field of management and control of wireless networks.