Implementation and Evaluation of Telehaptics over Long Term Evolution (4G) - Towards 5G Powered Telesurgery

In teleoperation systems, visual, audio, and haptic feedback are essential to understand operating conditions in a remote environment fully. Despite the success in the integration of visual and audio feedback into teleoperation systems, the incorporation of haptic feedback has been a challenge. This is mainly because the existing traditional network technologies and infrastructure do not meet these systems' stringent performance requirements, which include transmission delay of less than 10ms and network reliability greater than 99.99%. Such requirements are defined for the 5G ultra-reliable and low-latency communications service domain. However, despite the commercial deployment of 5G networks in developed countries, such as China, Canada, and Germany, network coverage in most developing countries is still 2G and 3G, with 4G limited to high-income areas. Therefore, optimising the performance of existing network infrastructures is necessary to meet the performance requirements of various mission-critical applications, such as haptic-enabled telesurgery, that will help increase access to specialized healthcare services in rural remote and underserved areas. This work presents a proof-of-concept design, implementation, and evaluation of a telehaptics system on a low-latency optimized 4G-based digital health network testbed. The Quality of Service parameters of reliability, end-to-end delay, and throughput is evaluated. The evaluation results revealed a minimum round trip transmission time of 14 ms over the 4G network, compared to the maximum delay acceptable for haptic-enabled telesurgery systems of 10 ms. Future work will include testing the system on 5G standalone and non-standalone testbed implementations.