A Versatile Experimental Platform for Tactile Internet: Design Guidelines and Practical Implementation

Tactile Internet (TI) is envisioned as a key use case for 6G with the ability to support a plethora of remote control-based applications. To achieve precise remote control, TI needs to utilize real-world testbeds for executing practical tests instead of simulation. However, the existing TI prototypes cannot be used as versatile experimental platforms due to their single communication mode and limited application scenarios. Moreover, the implementation of versatile experimental platforms is challenging, as the integration of diverse hardware modules requires multi-disciplinary knowledge. To this end, we propose and implement a versatile TI experimental platform, which can support multiple communication modes and various application scenarios. Specifically, we first analyze two types of TI platforms based on inter-active objects, present the general architecture of TI with three domains, and highlight several typical challenges of TI platform implementation. Then, we detailed describe the guidelines and key steps for designing the practical TI experimental platform. Finally, we present how to effectively implement the versatile experimental platform. The performance evaluation results highlight that the proposed platform is advantageous in terms of modularity, transparency, and scalability. The proposed platform can lay a solid foundation for developing novel TI algorithms and facilitating researchers from different disciplines to conduct practical experiments on a unified framework.