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Received: 28 February 2019 Revised: 1 April 2019 Accepted: 7 April 2019
DOI: 10.1002/dac.3981
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Tactile internet and its applications in 5G era: A
comprehensive review
Rajesh Gupta1Sudeep Tanwar1Sudhanshu Tyagi2Neeraj Kumar3
1Department of Computer Science and
Engineering, Institute of Technology,
Nirma University, Ahmedabad, Gujarat,
India
2Department of Electronics and
Communication Engineering, Thapar
Institute of Engineering and Technology,
Deemed University, Patiala, Punjab, India
3Department of Computer Science and
Engineering, Thapar Institute of
Engineering and Technology, Deemed
University, Patiala, Punjab, India
Correspondence
Sudeep Tanwar, Department of Computer
Science and Engineering, Institute of
Technology, Nirma University,
Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India.
Email: sudeep.tanwar@nirmauni.ac.in
Summary
Over the last few years, communication latency has been a major hurdle for
most of the applications deployed in different network domains. During this
era, a number of communication protocols and standards were developed and
used by the community. However, still, the problem of latency persists keep-
ing in view of the quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) for
different applications. To mitigate the aforementioned issues, in this paper, we
present an in-depth survey of state-of-the art proposals having tactile internet
as a backbone for delay mitigation using 5G networks for future ultra-reliable
low-latency applications such as Healthcare 4.0, Industry 4.0, virtual reality and
augmented reality, and smart education. From the existing proposals, it has been
observed that tactile internet can provide interactions between virtual objects to
give a feel of real environment with maximum latency of 1 millisecond. Also,
this paper highlights the key differences between the tactile internet and Inter-
net of Things in context with 5G revolution. Then open issues and challenges
of tactile internet for smart applications are analyzed. Finally, a comparison of
existing proposals with respect to various parameters is presented, which allows
the end users to select one of the proposals in comparison with its merits over
the others.
KEYWORDS
Healthcare 4.0, Industry 4.0, IoT, latency, reliability, tactile internet, 5G
1INTRODUCTION
Mobile communication allows users to exchange data using smart devices ubiquitously using the mobile internet (MI).
MI has millions of connected smart devices irrespective of their locations. It has revolutionized the different segments of
industries such as health care, logistics, education, gaming, and transportation for maintaining quality of service (QoS)
and quality of experience (QoE) for different applications. Moreover, it provides a device-to-device (D2D) communication,
ie, ubiquitous communication for data sharing and communication between devices. This D2D communication coined
the new term, the Internet of Things (IoT),1which provides the low power devices or equipments to perform specific tasks
in the environment where they are deployed. IoT is being used in various smart city applications such as smart lighten-
ing, smart parking, waste management, traffic congestion, and forest fire detection. In D2D communication, the mobile
devices can share prime or critical information in which a delay of even millisecond can harm the persons life (for example,
the information sharing during robotic telesurgery). Existing cellular systems infrastructure is not suitable for such sen-
sitive data sharing because of low data rates and long delay (greater than 20 ms). However, for D2D communications,
Int J Commun Syst. 2019;32:e3981. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/dac © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 1of49
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