The Tactile Internet

2Reference Architecture of the Tactile Internet

Tara ALI-YAHIYA

Department of Computer Science, University of Paris-Saclay, France

The design of devices supporting haptic technologies is essential for delivering the new services and different use cases introduced by the TI. In addition, the network architecture should entail all the use cases and demonstrate the interaction among the different functional entities of the TI. Proposing a general architecture will accelerate the deployment of the TI as it prepares the basis for TI functioning and makes it easy to add or remove some elements that are not needed from one use case to another. The flexibility of the design of the architecture and its role to act as an umbrella, even for special use cases that can be branched from a broad one, is a challenging matter. From this concept, the working group of IEEE 1918.1 proceeded to define the specifications of the TI by describing a global architecture that includes all the entities, interfaces, codec protocols for different types of applications. In this chapter, we will describe the architecture proposed by IEEE 1918.1 with its related use cases, as a step towards understanding the big picture of the TI from a technical point of view.

2.1. Tactile Internet system architecture

The TI working group IEEE 1918.1 defined the baselines of an architecture that makes use of a variety of telecommunication technologies, proximity of the cloud computing services to the users and the intelligent ...