QoS Provisioning: Key Drivers and Enablers Toward the Tactile Internet in Beyond 5G Era

The Tactile Internet has become a revolution for Internet technology, greatly improving the transmission of skill sets (audio, video, text, and haptics) over communication channels compared with traditional triple-play data (audio, video, text). It is a strong candidate to support next-generation delay-sensitive and loss-intolerant smart applications. However, stringent requirements for the Tactile Internet, including ultra-low latency, ultra-high reliability, high availability, and ultra-security, present critical challenges to ensure Quality of Service (QoS). Consequently, several approaches have been proposed to meet these QoS requirements. This article reviews QoS provisioning approaches for the Tactile Internet. First, we present key concepts for the fifth-generation and beyond technologies, Tactile Internet, and haptic communication. Second, we discuss the Tactile Internet use cases along with strict QoS requirements. Third, we classify existing solutions, including haptic codecs, control system designs, hybrid schemes, and intelligent prediction models; provide in-depth discussion regarding these approaches to improve QoS for the Tactile Internet applications; and investigate strengths and weaknesses for each proposed solution. Finally, we present open research challenges and discuss potential future research avenues to realize the Tactile Internet services.