Towards Enabling High-Five Over WiFi

TL;DR

This paper investigates WiFi-7's potential for ultra-low latency tactile Internet applications, identifies key pitfalls, and proposes a MAC layer enhancement called NoBuS to improve synchronization and reduce latency.

Contribution

It introduces NoBuS, a novel MAC layer scheme that mitigates WiFi-7 pitfalls, enabling more effective tactile Internet applications with lower latency and better synchronization.

Findings

NoBuS significantly improves RMSE of TI signals.

Worst-case WiFi latency with NoBuS is 3.72 ms, much lower than vanilla WiFi-7.

Standard jitter buffers hinder ULL performance in WiFi-7.

Abstract

The next frontier for immersive applications is enabling sentience over the Internet. Tactile Internet (TI) envisages transporting skills by providing Ultra-Low Latency (ULL) communications for transporting touch senses. In this work, we focus our study on the first/last mile communication, where the future generation WiFi-7 is pitched as the front-runner for ULL applications. We discuss a few candidate features of WiFi-7 and highlight its major pitfalls with respect to ULL communication. Further, through a specific implementation of WiFi-7 (vanilla WiFi-7) in our custom simulator, we demonstrate the impact of one of the pitfalls - standard practice of using jitter buffer in conjunction with frame aggregation - on TI communication. To circumvent this, we propose Non-Buffered Scheme (NoBuS) - a simple MAC layer enhancement for enabling TI applications on WiFi-7. NoBuS trades off packet loss for latency enabling swift synchronization between the master and controlled domains. Our findings reveal that employing NoBuS yields a significant improvement in RMSE of TI signals. Further, we show that the worst-case WiFi latency with NoBuS is 3.72 ms - an order of magnitude lower than vanilla WiFi-7 even under highly congested network conditions.