Mobile Edge Computing-Based Radio Access Network for Tactile Internet

Abstract

Tactile Internet is a new era of communication industry that provides the required infrastructure for communicating human touch and actuation in real-time. It has been announced as a main use case of the fifth-generation (5G) cellular system, and can be viewed as the bottleneck in the way toward the sixth generation (6G) cellular system. Tactile Internet comes with massive number of applications in all life fields that makes it one of the promising systems. Designing and developing Tactile Internet faces many challenges; however, the one millisecond end-to-end latency represents the main challenge. Moreover, the required ultra-high reliability and availability, and the high system flexibility are design challenges. To achieve the required one millisecond end-to-end latency, and overcome other challenges, new technologies and network structure should be deployed. To this end, this work provides an efficient mobile edge computing (MEC)-based radio access network (RAN) for Tactile Internet. The developed MEC-based RAN deploys a MEC server structure with a developed MEC controller that facilitates the MEC operation. The deployed MEC structure is a multilevel structure with heterogeneous edge servers. The developed structure is simulated over reliable environment for different simulation scenarios and the results indicate that the introduction of MEC controller achieves higher energy efficiency in terms of latency, availability, and reliability.