Guest Editorial of the Special Section on Tactile Internet for Consumer Internet of Things Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

The Tactile Internet (TI) is a logical transition of the Internet, which has progressed from a static, text-based Internet to a multimedia mobile Internet and finally to a Consumer Internet of Things (IoT). The major requirement of any TI applications is low latency, fast transit intervals, high availability, and a high level of security. For instance, latency requirement in Human to Machine (H2M) interactions may vary from < 10 ms up to tens of milliseconds and round-trip latency of 1 ms. This necessitates tactile applications close to end users to minimize delays. Edge Computing (EC) is a resource-rich decentralized platform that offers cloud computing functionalities at cellular base stations near users, saving energy and time on backhaul transmission to cloud servers. In a typical network security architecture of TI, the network administrator establishes network security policies, which segregate network traffic. However, deploying EC at the Internet edge places a strain on network management policies, making them subject to attacks such as Denial-of-Service (DoS), which can harm EC and produce unnecessary network traffic. This type of attack is restricted to EC nodes and has little effect on the backhaul network (such as cloud computing), which is more secure. Therefore, with the growing number of attack vectors, it is essential to develop security solutions for EC to enable computing-based TI applications secure and give application developers more alternatives. The Convergence of Cloud, EC, AI, and blockchain can potentially tackle major shortcomings of TI-driven Consumer IoT, its adoption is still in its infancy, suffering from various issues, such as lack of consensus towards any reference models or best practices.