Fog Computing for 5G-Enabled Tactile Internet: Research Issues, Challenges, and Future Research Directions

From the last few years, we have witnessed an exponential increase in the usage of delay-sensitive applications by the end-users because of the paradigm shift and revolution in different technologies starting from 1G to 5G most of which are having focus on QoS and QoE to the end-users. The existing standards on 5G mainly concentrate on the following issues: 10 Gigabyte data rate, 1-millisecond latency, high bandwidth per unit area, 99.999% availability, 100% coverage and 90% reduction in network energy usage. Hence, 5G has the capability to support various types of communications from the low power Local Area Network (LAN) to Wide Area Networks (WAN) with low-latency and high-speed. It allows human-to-human (H2H), human-to-machine (H2M) interactions for exchanging of data and signals. So, for better data transmission between different entities (for example, smart objects located across different geographic locations), efficient communication between billions of smart devices is required and the associated technology is called as Internet of Things. However, issues such as- latency-tolerant, low-data rate, high complexity, privacy and security in existing solutions may deteriorate the performance of any implemented solution in this environment. To mitigate the above-mentioned problems, the literature suggests that fog computing can be one of the options as it provides ultra-low-latency for Tactile-based applications. Tactile Internet is an emerging technology used for H2M interactions to support high-reliability, ultra-responsive, and high fidelity. Keeping focus on all the aforementioned challenges and constraints, in this paper, we provide an analysis on the usage of the strong backbone infrastructure of fog computing for 5G-enabled Tactile Internet with a maximum bandwidth of 1 Gigabyte having the minimum latency of 1-millisecond. It supports low-latency and high-reliability in Tactile-based applications. Keeping focus on the issues such as- resource management, communication infrastructure, fog orchestration, fog networking, healthcare, security and privacy of fog system in Tactile-based applications, we have explored and compared the existing state-of-the-art proposals using various parameters such as- energy-efficient, QoS, scalability, mobility, and interoperability. In addition, a number of open research challenges of fog computing for 5G-enabled Tactile Internet are also explored to provide deep insights to the readers.