Monday, October 6, 2014

Tactile Internet : The Next Big thing?



We are living in an era of Mobile data communication. This Mobile Internet connects people anywhere and allows for voice services and the exchange of data and multimedia content at any time. A number of innovations in the ICT sector have enabled exponential growth in network capacity, leading to the emergence of smartphones and a user-experience rich in multimedia.
The Internet of Things exploited the potential of networking by connecting devices and objects. The next wave of innovation will create the Tactile Internet.
Extremely low response time in combination with high reliability, availability and security will define the character of this upcoming idea. This can have a significant impact on business and society by introducing numerous new opportunities for emerging technology markets and the delivering the essential public services.

The ‘Logic’ behind it -1. Vision Tactile Internet – An Important Future Innovation Area
The perceptual processes of humans limit the speed of their interaction with the environment. We experience interaction with a technical system as intuitive and natural only if the feedback of the system is adapted to our human reaction time. As a result of which the requirements for technical systems enabling real-time interactions depend on the participating human senses. Human reaction times depend on the sensory stimulus and whether the human is prepared or unprepared for the situation. When a person reacts to a sudden incident, the time-lag between a human sensing a stimulus and responding with a muscular reaction is in the range of 1 sec.
On the other hand when a person is prepared for a situation, a faster reaction time is needed. The human auditory reaction time is about 100 ms. A typical human visual reaction time is in the range of 10 milliseconds. But for high speed requirements such as manually controlling a visual scene and issuing commands that anticipate rapid response, a reaction time of 1ms is required. Examples include moving a mouse pointer over a screen and viewing its smooth path over the screen, or moving our heads while wearing Virtual Reality goggles and expecting an immediate response from the visual display. To an extent we can say that all of our human senses can interact with machines, and technology’s potential in this respect is improving. Among the senses, the visual-tactile interaction between humans and technical systems is becoming more important, especially in light of the proliferation of smartphones. . Therefore for technical applications to match humans’ interaction, our natural reaction times and technical specifications must be in sync.

System Architecture

The basic underlying assumption is based on its requirement of the best possible response times, availability, reliability and security. These objectives can only be accomplished by a distributed service platform architecture. The need for ultra-low end-to-end latency requires that tactile applications be kept local, close to the users. In the initial step, a small local data center might support a cluster of user devices in its vicinity. This data center (or mini cloud) then provides the complete functionality of a wireless network as well as all tactile services required within the cluster. The next step would be to deploy a Mobile Edge-Cloud which will handle the tactile applications’ network functions at the edge of the mobile access network, closer to the user devices.

How does it affect me?

The instantaneous reaction of the Tactile Internet will enhance the way we communicate and lead to more realistic, immersive social interaction in private and business environments. It will affect the society in many ways.

ü  Education Redefined: Advanced methods for teaching such as e-Learning and online courses, as well as simulations of movements will be augmented by interactive elements far more advanced than today’s embedded tests. The instantaneous reaction times of the will make it possible to enable haptic overlay of the teacher and learner which will result in novel learning experiences.

ü  Healthcare sector: Better quality care will be possible by exploiting the amalgamated expertise of medical doctors connected via the Tactile Internet during remote diagnosis and treatment, as well as through the combination of experienced surgeons’ expertise with the high spatial precision of robot-assisted operations. Additionally, the support and assistance provided to people with disabilities by exoskeleton based artificial limbs and power amplifiers will improve their mobility, ensuring them the ability to lead a self-determined life.

ü  Personal Safety Zones: The capabilities of the Tactile Internet will permit the creation of a personal spatial safety zone, or ‘bubble’, able to interact with nearby objects also connected to the Tactile Internet. Applied to road traffic, in the long term this safety zone will be able to protect drivers, passengers and pedestrians. Vehicles will detect safety-critical situations and react instantly to avoid traffic accidents and warn other objects of impending danger.

ü  Smart City traffic: The connectivity of vehicles in the Tactile Internet will enable co-operative traffic modes, where traffic flow will be optimized by heeding local safety constraints as well as parameters such as the overall traffic density in a Smart City.

ü  Energy: With respect to energy generation also, the Tactile Internet enables dynamic activation and deactivation of local power generation and consumption, potentially even taking into account the AC phase information to minimize the generation of unusable reactive power.






Areas of application -plication Fields
Industry
Automation in industry is one of the most significant field for the Tactile Internet. The sensitivity of control circuits when controlling rapidly moving devices (eg- industrial robots) requires an end-to-end latency significantly below 1 millisecond per sensor. In industrial controlled closed loop system scenarios, at intervals of roughly a millisecond, a master station contacts all sensors and actuator and present the acquired data to the control application. If there are large number of sensors then every individual sensor must be accessed within an end-to-end latency period.

Augmented Reality
The Tactile Internet will reach new frontiers in assistance systems too. Gradual transition from being restricted to mainly pre-processed content to the augmentation of dynamic content or up-to-date information is now possible. This in reference to the road traffic accidents will enable the real-time virtual extension of a driver’s field of view. Possible dangerous events caused by drivers’ not seeing people or obstacles in fog or rain, or as a result of curved roads, can now be captured by other vehicles that are able to transmit their view to following vehicles in the form of a projection onto the windshield. The concept of ‘seeing what others see’ can also be exploited to great effect in medicine, rescue operations or the virtual attendance of live concerts.

Serious Gaming
Serious Games are games designed for a primary purpose other than entertainment. They combine fun with problem-solving challenges and goal-oriented motivation for improvement. Serious Games are relevant to several application fields important to our society; among them education, training, simulation and health.

Interactive learning
We all require the ability to elicit precise, coordinated small-muscle movements in body parts such as our hands and fingers. This idea will enable substantially improved learning experiences based on the haptic overlay of the teacher and learner. When the student executes a task, the teacher will feel the trajectory and degree of applied forces, correcting them as required. Such kind of precise operation requires identical multi-modal human-machine interfaces capable of visual, auditory and haptic interaction.

Security
The technical requirements of the Tactile Internet, especially ultra-low end-to-end latency, pose enormous challenges for communications systems. Paradigm changes are necessary, to ensure both data security and the availability and dependability of systems. Nowadays, a secure communication is based on separating the encryption from the transmission technology.
Hence, the Tactile Internet will enable an unforeseeable plurality of new applications, products and services. It will enable humans and machines to interact with their environment in real time, while mobile and within a certain spatial communication range. As a key driver of innovation, the Tactile Internet represents a revolutionary level of development for economics, society and culture.



Parag Shukla
Marketing and Finance - Batch of 2016
Symbiosis Institute of Telecom Management, Pune
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