HoIP: A point-to-point haptic data communication protocol and its evaluation

Telehaptics applications are usually characterized by a strict imposition of a round trip haptic data latency of less than 30 ms. In this paper, we present Haptics over Internet Protocol (HoIP) - a low latency application layer protocol that enables haptic, audio and video data transmission over a network between two remotely connected nodes. The evaluation of the protocol is carried out through a set of three experiments, each with distinct objectives. First, a haptic-audio-visual (HAV) interactive application, involving two remotely located human personnel communicating via haptic, auditory and visual media, to evaluate the Quality of Service (QoS) violation due to the protocol. Second, a haptic sawing experiment with the goal of assessing the impact of HoIP and network delays in telehaptics applications, by taking the example of a typical telesurgical activity. Third, a telepottery system to determine the protocol's ability in reproducing a real-time interactive user experience with a remote virtual object, in presence of perceptual data compression and reconstruction techniques. Our experiments reveal that the transmission scheduling of multimedia packets performs well in terms of maintaining the latencies well under the QoS thresholds.