On Low Latency Uplink Scheduling for Cellular Haptic Communication to Support Tactile Internet

Haptic communication is a form of non-verbal communication involving touch and feel. Haptic communication is a major requirement for the Tactile Internet that deals with mechanism to transmit touch, feel, and skills between two geographically distant entities, in realtime. Lately, haptic communication has become an essential requirement for variety of realtime robotic and Augmented/Virtual Reality applications. With very stringent delay and reliability requirements, haptic communication poses significant challenges for network engineers. This becomes further complicated when the cellular technology is used as the access medium for haptic communication. Since cellular networks are resource constrained, accommodating haptic users along with existing non-haptic users become a hard scheduling problem. In this paper, we propose an efficient latency-aware uplink resource allocation scheme satisfying end-to-end delay requirements of haptic users in a Long Term Evolution based cellular network. The proposed scheme first predicts the downlink and processing delays for users’ transmission flows. Subsequently, the model apply an optimal scheduling scheme for the uplink transmissions which satisfies expected end-to-end latency constraint. Our extensive simulations indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms some of the widely used state-of-the-art scheduling schemes.