## 1 Introduction  
The Tactile Internet (TI) in the Fifth-Generation (5G) communication infrastructure, and Beyond 5G (B5G) has been considered a potential enabler for service categories such as Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) communication, Massive Machine-Type Communication (mMTC) and Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) [1] to allow the interactions between humans, machines and Internet of Things (IoT) devices with audio and/or visual haptic feedback over a certain remote distance [2, 3]. The TI communication infrastructure demands significantly high performance concerning ultra-low latency (\(\leq\)1 ms), high bandwidth (30-300) GHz, ultra-high availability (99.999%), ultra-reliability and high data rate support for Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) applications. Considering key enabling TI technologies such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Network Slicing (NS), Network Function Virtualisation (NFV), Network Coding (NC) and Multiple Access (MA) techniques, the TI communication infrastructure aims to improve their immersive, responsive and interactive services/applications. Thus, these technologies facilitate necessary dynamic infrastructure, optimising resource allocation and utilisation, offloading computational capabilities, and improving spectral efficiency, Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE). According to the Ericsson Mobility Report [4], a significant 28% surge was observed in mobile network data traffic between the 4 th quarter of 2022 and 2023, reaching a monthly consumption of 152 exabytes, contributing to approximately 8.5 billion mobile subscribers. In addition, the Cisco annual Internet report (2018-2023) [5] stated that, by 2023, global Internet users were estimated to touch 5.3 billion, constituting 66% of the world's population. IoT devices will exceed three times the population, totalling 29.3 billion, whereas Machine-to-Machine (M2M) (a.k.a IoT) connections constitute half. The user devices surpassed the total connections, representing 74%, whereas the IoT applications were forecast to have substantial growth, with a 30% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR). Despite the technological advancements in 5G communication infrastructure compared to First to Fourth Generation (1G-4G) ones, the system capacity and spectral efficiency improvement fall short of the 1000\(\times\) increase mentioned in the International Mobile Telecommunications--2020 (IMT-2020) vision [6]. To improve the system capacity and spectral efficiency, the mobile and wireless communication infrastructure has employed several MA techniques from 1G to 4G, such as 1G--Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA), Second Generation (2G)--Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), Third Generation (3G)--Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), and 4G--Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), or combinations of these MA techniques. These MA techniques are adopted to share the available bandwidth among multiple users and reply on the resource (time/frequency) orthogonalisation, thus assigning different resources to individual users. Moreover, the bandwidth is wasted due to users' utilisation of separate orthogonal Resource Blocks (RBs) using traditional MA techniques. These MA techniques are examples of Orthogonal Multiple Access (OMA) schemes. Hence, these traditional MA techniques lack the competencies to serve multiple users having sensors and actuators simultaneously, rendering them unsuitable for a 5G communication infrastructure. In general, MA techniques can be structurally classified into OMA for 1G to 4G and Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) for 5G. As mentioned, one of the high-performance enablers concerning parameters for TI communication infrastructure in 5G, the MA techniques, viz., NOMA, are complementing the 5G New Radio (NR) robust, flexible and scalable framework. However, integrating NOMA can further resolve challenges and serve the demands of the proliferation of users, whether sensors or actuators, by utilising the same RB, according to 3 GPP standardisation [7].