A Tactile Internet demonstration: 1ms ultra low delay for wireless communications towards 5G

Communication technologies of the Tactile Internet have to achieve a combination of extremely low latency under high reliability and security constraints. The targeted applications are in the fields of industry automation and transport systems, healthcare, education and gaming. 5G addresses tactile use cases under the term mission-critical machine type communication. We demonstrate a first implementation of a wireless broadband communication system utilizing 20MHz bandwidth which can achieve a round-trip delay below 1 ms. Delay measurements were performed between two endpoints over the air. The system is based on a flexible Software Defined Radio (SDR) toolkit with PHY and MAC signal processing algorithms implemented on a multi-core DSP platform. The demonstration shows a live end-to-end transmission of real data packets while at the same time evaluating latency probes. In addition, we show the general feasibility of real-time implementation of ultra-low delay signal processing on SDRs. Finally, we give results by evaluation of latency and reliability performance indicators.