A review on tactile IoT: Architecture, requirements, prospects, and future directions

Tactile internet (TI) has emerged as a new possibility into revolutionizing whole society by involving human beings, communication aspects, and industrial operation. Main purpose of TI is to disseminate perceptual, that is, haptic information to remote industry machines for pouring skills and expertise as if it were actually accomplished by a person in reality. Internet of things is an established tool to serve various smart application development that mainly depends on sensors, actuators, communication technology, and cloud-based services. Existing studies do not clearly mention the key requirements, architectural standardization and TI enabled functions to transfer haptic information via a suitable communication media. Although 5G has been considered as a valuable core of TI infrastructure, lack of actual implementation and related evidence has raised a dilemma about its effectiveness for industry applications leaving with no direction. In this article, we present architectural and system model-wise development of tactile internet of things for possible industry application realization. We also present key requirements, functional and optimal aspects of tactile internet of things. Study of potential communication technologies and state-of-the-art study on recent works on TI-based approaches are paved. Lastly, we present key open challenges and future direction to augment this problem.