The Opportunities of the 5G Tactile Internet – A Challenge for Future Electronics

Gerhard P. Fettweis, Vodafone Chair Professor, Technische Universitat, Dresden, Germany

In the last decades wireless communications has shaped societies and economies. Most current innovation of wireless communications is centered on continuously increasing data rates. This has been the main motivation for going from 2nd generation to 3rd and now 4th generation cellular technology. 
Up to now we use communications equipment to share and distribute content, examples being audio, voice, video, web data, and pictures. However, the next (fifth) cellular communications generation will enable remotely controlling real and virtual objects in real-time anywhere. Currently, the key missing technical ingredient for this is that remote controlled tactile interaction with our surroundings requires a guaranteed very short end-to-end latency on the order of 1 ms. Once this “Tactile Internet” is available, humans as well as robots will be able to interact in real-time with virtual as well as real objects. That is the basis for a complete new set of applications, spanning the economies of health & care, manufacturing, mobility, edutainment, events, and energy.
The technical challenges for enabling the end-to-end response time for the Tactile Internet are large. Current cellular technology is nearly two orders of magnitude too slow. Additionally, safety critical applications require an unprecedented guaranteed availability.  Well-designed networks deliver only 97% uptime guarantee. This is in sharp contrast to an end-to-end outage as low as 10-8, e.g. to deliver an infrastructure to revolutionize manufacturing around “Industry 4.0”. Finally, Tactile Internet control centers cannot run on today’s cloud servers, as their access delay alone exceed the 1ms latency requirement. 
Hence, we have to revisit capabilities of electronics to redesign cloud computing, communications networks, and the wireless access, just to name the obvious. First research outcomes of the German Science Foundation funded center “HAEC”, German government funded “FAST”, and the “5G Lab Germany” will be presented, showing that the path moving towards the Tactile Internet is physically possible and likely to be realized soon.

Reception to follow in DuPont Lobby.