Utilizing Massive MIMO for the Tactile Internet: Advantages and Trade-Offs

Abstract

Controlling robots in real-time over a wireless interface present fundamental challenges for forthcoming fifth generation wireless networks. Mission critical real-time applications such as telesurgery over the tactile Internet require a communication link that is both ultra-reliable and low-latency, and that simultaneously serving multiple devices and applications. Wireless performance requirements for these applications surpass the capabilities of current wireless cellular standards. The prevailing ambitions for the fifth generation wireless specifications go beyond higher throughput and embrace the wireless performance demands of mission critical real-time applications in robotics and the Internet of Things. To accommodate these demands, changes have to be made across all layers of the wireless infrastructure. The fifth generation wireless standards are far from finalized but massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output has surfaced as a strong radio access technology candidate and has great potential to cope with all these stringent requirements. In this paper, we investigate how Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Communication with massive MIMO can be achieved for bilateral teleoperation, an integral part of the tactile Internet. We conclude through simulation what the performance bounds are for massive MIMO and thus how to configure such a system for near deterministic latency and what the inherit trade-offs are.

Wireless Access in Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC)

“…In a multi-user system, this property can be exploited to improve the latency incurred due to multiple access, as multiple users can exchange data simultaneously. However, it should be noted that the multi-antenna processing employed to separate the users might induce additional computational delay [40]. This section is dedicated to the exploitation of multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver to support URLLC.…”

“…In [37], for the uplink of a single user massive MIMO system with 64 antennas at the base station, diverse multi-antenna schemes are tested: coherent and non-coherent transceivers, transceivers assuming that the channel is unknown at the transmitter and using space-time codes, where the preference is given to non-coherent transceivers. In [40], the accent is put on the processing delay caused by multiple antenna processing at a base station in a multi-user massive MIMO system. In [38], a multi-user massive MIMO system network is optimized under a probabilistic constraint on the queue size to satisfy URLLC requirements.…”

Massive MIMO for Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity

“…2) URLLC and massive MIMO: The general principles of achieving URLLC have been discussed in [24], where the importance of optimizing the reliability of the signaling information is highlighted, as well as efficient utilization of the diversity sources. URLLC is treated from a massive MIMO perspective in [25], where the authors emphasize the requirements of tactile Internet and how many antennas are needed to meet the requirements for a given number of simultaneous users, using maximum-ratio transmission (MRT) and zero-forcing (ZF) beamforming, and assuming ideal channel estimation. However, in practice, channel estimation is rarely ideal, being affected by imperfections or pilot interference between users.…”

Programmable intelligent spaces for Industry 4.0: Indoor visual localization driving attocell networks

“…In Industry 4.0, there will be multiple devices simultaneously requiring communication services with high reliability and low latency . However, unfortunately, link‐control mechanisms that provide reliability in Long Term Evolution might not be feasible at such low over‐the‐air latency using traditional hybrid automatic repeat request and automatic repeat request …”

“…3 In Industry 4.0, there will be multiple devices simultaneously requiring communication services with high reliability and low latency. 15 However, unfortunately, link-control mechanisms that provide reliability in Long Term Evolution might not be feasible at such low over-the-air latency using traditional hybrid automatic repeat request and automatic repeat request. 3 Therefore, reactive resource allocation methods, which integrate localization methods and wireless connectivity, have been employed by the communication system to tackle the mobility problem and low latency requirement in indoor wireless networks.…”