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 keeping 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 Internet 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.
KEYWORDSHealthcare 4.0, Industry 4.0, IoT, latency, reliability, tactile internet, 5G
INTRODUCTIONMobile 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), 1 which 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 lightening, 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 sensitive 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