Traces for the Tactile Internet: Architecture, concepts, and evaluations

The Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop (TaHiL) is bound to revolutionize the approaches to interactions at the human-machine intersection as well as for related services. Covering the domains described by common labels, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Internet of Skills (IoS), the application domains of this ultralow latency and highly reliable network communications paradigm are manifold and will draw a significant amount of research and development attention across academia and industry. This, however, requires a fresh approach to enable the broad sharing of research enabling replicability and reproducibility in the community. This chapter describes a holistic view of the generation and utilization of gathered experimental data within the Tactile Internet’s application scenarios and at the accompanying ultralow timescale level. Specifically, we discuss a generic approach to the generation of experimental artifacts termed traces, which represent the many facets in the Tactile Internet domain in common formats, such as plain text, that enable their direct implementation in different research efforts in a straightforward manner. We provide some insights from initial evaluations of these trace files for different scenarios and outline the need for future research in this foundational domain that serves as one of the building blocks of enabling the broad research community with the means to conduct the cross-disciplinary research that lies at the core of the Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop.