A Fog-based Architecture for Remote Phobia Treatment

Tactile Internet is a next generation Internet. It allows the exchange of haptic sensations in addition to audio and video content. It is a key enabler of several emerging applications as remote robotic surgery and autonomous driving, when combined with 5G and Edge Computing. Because Tactile Internet will enable mission critical applications, it has to adhere to strict requirements, mainly in terms of ultra-responsiveness, ultra-reliability and security. In this paper, we propose a fog-based architecture for remote phobia treatment, a Tactile Internet application. The proposed architecture offers a set of software modules that allow a phobia patient to have a therapy session, under the guidance of an expert therapist located remotely, with the patient and the therapist sharing the same virtual reality environment. We use the fog paradigm to meet the stringent Tactile Internet requirements, namely the round trip latency of 1ms. The components of the architecture offer high level interfaces to simplify interaction with external software components as well as with a wide range of hardware devices. A prototype is also implemented and the performance is discussed.