Alleviating the Master-Slave Distance Limitation in H2M Communications through Remote Environment Emulation

In the past few years, we have seen communication networks evolve from predominantly supporting content-centric traffic under the Internet paradigm to increasingly serving machine-centric traffic under the Internet-of-Things paradigm. We are also currently in the throes of the next evolutionary leap in communication networks, under the new paradigm known as the Tactile Internet. Human-to-machine communications is central to TI, empowering humans (masters) to immersively interact with remote environments. Predictably, traffic in a TI is dominated by control and haptic feedback data that have strict reliability and latency requirements on the communication network. Consequently, the strict latency requirement of H2M communication places a limit on the distance that can be deployed between the master and slaves domains. This paper will explore a new approach that facilitates remote environment emulation to alleviate the master-slave distance limitation and decouple this limitation from the perceived latency.