Ultrareliable and Low-Latency Communication Techniques for Tactile Internet Services

TLDR

URLLC services such as the Tactile Internet must deliver diverse traffic—including haptic, kinesthetic, and tactile data—alongside video and audio, with varying packet sizes, data rates, and stringent latency and reliability demands that current wireless systems cannot meet. This paper proposes novel ultrareliable, low‑latency communication techniques spanning the physical to network layers to satisfy these heterogeneous traffic requirements. The approach introduces waveform multiplexing, advanced multiple‑access, channel coding, synchronization, and full‑duplex transmission, and evaluates performance via a combined ray‑tracing and system‑level simulation framework. Simulation results demonstrate the feasibility of the schemes in realistic geographic settings, validating their potential for realistic URLLC services.

Abstract

This paper presents novel ultrareliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) techniques for URLLC services, such as Tactile Internet services. Among typical use-cases of URLLC services are tele-operation, immersive virtual reality, cooperative automated driving, and so on. In such URLLC services, new kinds of traffic such as haptic information including kinesthetic information and tactile information need to be delivered in addition to high-quality video and audio traffic in traditional multimedia services. Further, such a variety of traffic has various characteristics in terms of packet sizes and data rates with a variety of requirements of latency and reliability. Furthermore, some traffic may occur in a sporadic manner but require reliable delivery of packets of medium to large sizes within a low latency, which is not supported by current state-of-the-art wireless communication systems and is very challenging for future wireless communication systems. Thus, to meet such a variety of tight traffic requirements in a wireless communication system, novel technologies from the physical layer to the network layer need to be devised. In this paper, some novel physical layer technologies such as waveform multiplexing, multiple access scheme, channel code design, synchronization, and full-duplex transmission for spectrally-efficient URLLC are introduced. In addition, a novel performance evaluation approach, which combines a ray-tracing tool and system-level simulation, is suggested for evaluating the performance of the proposed schemes. Simulation results show the feasibility of the proposed schemes providing realistic URLLC services in realistic geographical environments, which encourages further efforts to substantiate the proposed work.