Tactile Internet for Autonomous Vehicles: Latency and Reliability Analysis

In the Industry 4.0 era, the automobile industry manufactures safe, reliable, Internet-enabled vehicles for usage by end users. This revolution is possible with the rapid advances in ICT, which are helping autonomous vehicles become a reality. Many leading manufacturing companies have developed autonomous vehicles keeping in view the future smart cities planning across the world. However, to make the autonomous vehicle a reality, several challenges, such as-software heterogeneity, real-time data analytics, verification and validation, and latency, need to be resolved. Among the aforementioned challenges, the latency issue requires careful attention so as to satisfy the needs of consumers, the manufacturing industry, and government regulations. In this direction, 5G-based testbeds across the globe are used by researchers with an aim to reduce the latency in autonomous vehicles. Thus, in this article, 5G-network-based non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is used to meet the stringent latency and reliability requirements of autonomous vehicles. Various challenges for implementation and usage of NOMA for future 5G-based applications are also discussed in the article.