Toward Human-in-the-Loop Mobile Networks: A Radio Resource Allocation Perspective on Haptic Communications

The exchange of haptic information in remote operation systems allows humans to physically interact in remote environments with complete immersion. Such human-in-the-loop networks have been realized through wired solutions in the past. It is expected that the emerging 5G mobile communications networks will be able to meet the stringent requirements of real-time haptic interaction. By enabling haptic communications over 5G networks, human-in-the-loop mobile networks will emerge, that will support unprecedented applications. The main objective of this paper is to investigate the problem of radio resource allocation for haptic communications over 5G networks. The key requirements of haptic communications from a radio resource allocation perspective have been identified. These requirements have been translated into two distinct optimization problems for radio resource allocation, pertaining to perceptual coding and symmetric design cases. To reduce complexity, a two-step solution has been provided after decomposing the original optimization problems. In both cases, low-complexity greedy heuristic algorithms and near-optimal solutions have been proposed for resource allocation. Performance evaluation has been conducted based on a 5G air-interface design.