Combined Data Rate and Energy Management in Harvesting Enabled Tactile IoT Sensing Devices

The Tactile Internet is envisioned to be characterized by ultra low latency, ultra reliability with high availability, and security. The next fifth generation is expected to underpin this emerging technology at the wireless edge. The stringent low latency and high reliability requirements of the Tactile Internet render the design more challenging in the presence of energy constraints on Internet of Things device in the underlying device-to-device network. In this paper, to deal with the stringent delay requirements of the tactile communication in the presence of energy constraints on devices and nodes, we pose the combined energy management and rate control problem as a queue control problem, where the objective is to control the energy and data queues to predefined reference levels. The intelligently controlled energy queues make the communication reliable and guarantee that nodes of the network are always alive and have some amount of energy close to predefined reference values for emergency and critical operations. In addition, tight control of the data queue ensures low queuing delays. We have considered both linear and nonlinear model of queues and have designed controllers based on model predictive control and nonlinear control theory. Convergence properties of the controllers are established analytically and the effectiveness of the proposed methods is also demonstrated through simulations.