IoTactileSim: A Virtual Testbed for Tactile Industrial Internet of Things Services

With the inclusion of tactile Internet (TI) in the industrial sector, we are at the doorstep of the tactile Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). This provides the ability for the human operator to control and manipulate remote industrial environments in real-time. The TI use cases in IIoT demand a communication network, including ultra-low latency, ultra-high reliability, availability, and security. Additionally, the lack of the tactile IIoT testbed has made it more severe to investigate and improve the quality of services (QoS) for tactile IIoT applications. In this work, we propose a virtual testbed called IoTactileSim, that offers implementation, investigation, and management for QoS provisioning in tactile IIoT services. IoTactileSim utilizes a network emulator Mininet and robotic simulator CoppeliaSim to perform real-time haptic teleoperations in virtual and physical environments. It provides the real-time monitoring of the implemented technology parametric values, network impairments (delay, packet loss), and data flow between operator (master domain) and teleoperator (slave domain). Finally, we investigate the results of two tactile IIoT environments to prove the potential of the proposed IoTactileSim testbed.