  Robotic telesurgery has a potential to provide extreme and urgent health care
services and bring unprecedented opportunities to deliver highly specialized
skills globally. It has a significant societal impact and is regarded as one of
the appealing use cases of Tactile Internet and 5G applications. However, the
performance of robotic telesurgery largely depends on the network performance
in terms of latency, jitter and packet loss, especially when telesurgical
system is equipped with haptic feedback. This imposes significant challenges to
design a reliable and secure but cost-effective communication solution. This
article aims to give a better understanding of the characteristics of robotic
telesurgical system, and the limiting factors, the possible telesurgery
services and the communication quality of service (QoS) requirements of the
multi-modal sensory data. Based on this, a viable network architecture enabled
by the converged edge and core cloud is presented and the relevant research
challenges, open issues and enabling technologies in the 5G communication
system are discussed.
