Toward a Fog-Based Traffic Flow Framework for Tactile Internet

Empowered by sufficient robotics and haptic hardware at the edges of a communication network system, tactile Internet (TI) is the upcoming transformation that will empower the control of Internet of Things in real time and facilitate a true paradigm shift in making a dream into a reality. However, one of the most crucial challenges in realizing TI is to achieve round-trip time (RTT) of 1 ms or less. This RTT includes transmission, queuing, processing (operator’s end), and acknowledgement times (controlled end). Another challenge is to achieve ultrahigh reliability for establishing haptic communications for TI. This article proposes a novel fog-based traffic flow framework employing software-defined networking (SDN) and fog computing (FC) to address these challenges. An efficient traffic flow algorithm is developed to effectively manage complex and critical traffic in the network to reduce extra processing and waiting times at each level of clouds. The SDN and FC approaches provide an effective solution to route the traffic efficiently in the system. Hence, the traffic flow paths from the master to slave sections are reduced, and consequently, RTT is also reduced. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated by an iFogSim simulator in terms of throughput, RTT, energy consumption, and reliability. The simulation results obtained show that the proposed system outperforms the existing edge, cloud, and cellular networks.