Towards 5G-enabled Tactile Internet: Radio resource allocation for haptic communications

The Tactile Internet will be able to transport touch and actuation in real-time. The primary application running over the Tactile Internet will be haptic communications. Design efforts for both the Tactile Internet and the haptic communications are at a nascent stage. It is expected that the next generation (5G) wireless networks will play a key role in realizing the Tactile Internet. On the other hand, Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) networks would be an integral component of the 5G ecosystem. Therefore, exploring the potential of LTE-A networks for haptic communications would be an important step towards realizing the Tactile Internet. To this end, the main objective of this paper is to investigate radio resource allocation for haptic communications in LTE-A networks. The radio resource requirements of haptic communications have been translated into a unique resource allocation problem which becomes particularly challenging due to the specific constraints of multiple access schemes in LTE-A networks. Novel heuristic algorithm has been developed to solve the resource allocation problem. Performance evaluation has been conducted using simulation studies for a recently proposed 5G air-interface design.