A Comprehensive Survey on MEC Enabled Tactile Internet: Applications, Challenges, and Efficient Resource Handling

Future innovative applications such as remote surgery, smart cities, and autonomous vehicles require ultra-low latency and ultra-reliability. The tactile internet (TI) framework extends all haptic communication requirements and supports real-time services. However, the emerging networks i.e. 5G and 6G rise to the challenge of the TI application framework. The TI emerged along with haptic communication and integrates capabilities of 5G/6G, MEC, and haptic technologies, especially in human-machine interaction. Whereas, MEC provides new insights for the logical integration of TI and Internet of Things (IoT) as Tactile Internet of Things (TIoT). This manuscript reviews an architectural approach to TI capable of high-performance industrial wireless communication. In particular, it focuses on the key challenges of TI and how to address these challenges. Additionally, this research examines, organizes, and classifies the idea and implementation of integration between the MEC and TI framework. Finally, a direction of efficient resource allocation using the virtualization of physical MEC resources in the TI framework is proposed and summarized.