Bilateral Teleoperation Performance Model for Network Resource Management

In the forthcoming era of the Tactile Internet, haptic communication is foreseen as one of its major use cases with impact in manufacturing, healthcare, education, as well as the service industry. Recent efforts in networking attempt to meet the requirements of such use cases providing the latency and reliability for bilateral teleoperation, the main component of haptic communication. However, the impact of changes in latency on bilateral teleoperation system performance varies among different control schemes and is dependent on the application domain. Furthermore, while recent efforts to reduce latency in wireless communication with tailored configurations have been successful, an increasing number of haptic communication flows could potentially compete when sharing network resources. In this paper, we provide a tractable model for teleoperation system performance that captures the impact of latency on different performance criteria. We then use this performance model to shape queuing prioritisation of different traffic flows. The proposed framework considers the requirements of high and low priority flows to suggest the best possible control scheme option to be used by the high priority one and at the same time keep the impact of the network scheduling discipline on the low priority one at minimum.