Soft Resource Reservation for Low-Delayed Teleoperation over Mobile Networks

The emerging Tactile Internet (TI) will enable control-oriented networks for remotely accessing or manipulating objects or devices. One major challenge in this context is how to achieve ultra-low-delay communication between the local operator and the remote object/device to guarantee the stability of the global control loop and to maximize the user's quality-of-experience (QoE). Being one of the major human-in-the-loop applications of the TI, haptic teleoperation inherits its delay-sensitive nature and requires the orchestration of communication and control approaches. In this paper, we focus on the radio access protocol, and its impact on the latency of wireless communication. We propose a novel soft resource reservation mechanism for the uplink scheduling of mobile networks that can significantly reduce the latency compared with the current legacy scheme. By leveraging the characteristics of teleoperation data traffic, and reserving resources accordingly, the proposed soft reservation scheme maintains the spectral efficiency while the human operator's QoE is improved. The simulation results confirm the efficiency of the proposed scheme.