The Tactile Internet over 5G FiWi Architectures

The Tactile Internet (TI) holds great promise to have a profound socio‐economic impact on a broad array of applications in our everyday life, ranging from industry automation and transport systems to healthcare, telesurgery, and education. This chapter focuses on the proposed fiber‐wireless (FiWi) enhanced LTE‐Advanced heterogeneous networks, on which emerging 5G systems are envisioned to rely. It presents in‐depth technical insights into realizing human‐in‐the‐loop centric teleoperation TI over FiWi enhanced networks, including trace‐based haptic traffic modeling, perceptual deadband coding, haptic sample forecasting, and trace‐driven simulations. Collaborative computing based human‐to‐robot communications in advanced FiWi based TI infrastructures may offer significant benefits in terms of improved task execution time, cost reduction, and scalability. Collaboration and communication among humans‐are‐better‐at/machines‐are‐better‐at members is important to cope with dynamic changes in the task environment. TI traffic is expected to require the underlying communication networks to undergo profound modifications, both from architectural and medium access control viewpoints.