# IoTactileSim: A Virtual Testbed for Tactile Industrial Internet of Things Services
## 1 Introduction
The relationships between emerging technologies such as IoT, IIoT, Industrial Internet, Internet of Everything (IoE), TI, tactile IoT, tactile IIoT, Industry 4.0 and 5.0 are presented in Figure 2.  
An in-depth discussion on conventional and emerging industrial is presented in [7], where the authors investigated the role of TI in the industrial environment, along with technical connectivity requirements of the TI industrial services. One of the vital use cases of the TI in the industrial domain is the bilateral/multilateral haptic-driven teleoperation systems. A teleoperation system consists of a human operator (master), teleoperator (slave), and a communication network that link the master to a slave domain, and enable the operator to interact with the teleoperator in the distant and inaccessible remote environment to perform complex tasks. The TI-based network provides bilateral communication to manage touch and actuation in real-time between the master and slave domain with a  
Figure 1: A taxonomy of the different emerging communication trends. focus to ensure QoS and QoE requirements. Haptic-enabled teleoperation systems have numerous applications in Industry 4.0, such as robotic automation, smart manufacturing, smart logistic, the mining industry, food industry, healthcare industry, and industrial management (controlling and monitoring). Contrary to the traditional application, Haptic-enabled industrial applications demand high QoS and QoE, and depend on the nature of the application. One of the effective ways to investigate the tactile IIoT application requirements, performance, and testing the new solutions to ensure QoS and QoE, is to set up a virtual testbed similar to the real network. The testbed must allow us to utilize and maintain hardware and software virtually on a standard computer without purchasing them. In the literature, several recent articles have proposed testbeds to overcome the above-mentioned challenges. The work in [13] proposed a haptic system testbed to characterize and validate E2E haptic communication of different use cases of TI. The authors introduce a framework comprised of multiple sub-blocks that can be re-configured based on the nature of use cases, with a focus on minimizing cost and evaluation time. It also provides an option to integrate the testbed with the simulation platform through a connector interface to perform testing. Commonly, it is intended to offer an extensive range of haptic hardware, including sensors, actuators, and tactile interface boards. A testbed for tactile and kinesthetic data coding was proposed in [14] aligned with IEEE P1918.1 TI standard working group to improve and standardize haptic codec. The proposed haptic coding testbed is considered as a reference testbed with the aim to develop optimal data compression schemes to exchange tactile and kinesthetic information and enable human-in-the-loop TI services. The authors \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l l l l l} \hline \hline \multicolumn{2}{l}{**Applications/Requirements**} & \multicolumn{1}{l}{**Latency (ms)**} & \multicolumn{1}{l}{**Reliability (\%)**} & \multicolumn{1}{l}{**Scalability**} & \multicolumn{1}{l}{**Data Rate (Mbps)**} \\ \hline \multirow{4}{*}{
\begin{tabular}{l} \\ \end{tabular} } & Monitoring & 50–100 & 99.9–99.99 & 10–1000 & 0.1–0.5 \\ \cline{2-5}  & Safety control & 10 & 99.99–99.999 & 10–20 & 0.1–1 \\ \cline{2-5}  & Motion control & 0.5–2 & 99.9999–99.9999 & 10–50 & 1–5 \\ \cline{2-5}  & Closed-loop control & 100–150 & 99.99–99.999 & 100–150 & 1–5 \\ \cline{2-5}  & Remote monitoring and maintenance & 20–50 & 99.99–99.999 & 500–1000 & 1–2 \\ \cline{2-5}  & Remote operation (teleoperations) & 2–10 & 99.999–99.9999 & 1–5 & 100–200 \\ \cline{2-5}  & Mobile workforce & 5–10 & 99.999–99.9999 & 50–100 & 10–50 \\ \cline{2-5}  & Augmented reality & 10 & 99.99–99.999 & 10–20 & 500–1000 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Summary of the connectivity requirements for traditional IIoT and emerging tactile IIoT services.