Congestion Control for Network-Aware Telehaptic Communication

TL;DR

This paper introduces DPM, a network-aware congestion control protocol for telehaptic communication that dynamically adjusts packetization based on network congestion, ensuring QoS and high-quality telehaptic experience.

Contribution

The paper presents DPM, a novel lossless, network-aware congestion control protocol with a new feedback mechanism for telehaptic applications over shared networks.

Findings

DPM effectively maintains QoS under varying network conditions.

DPM outperforms existing telehaptic protocols in simulations.

Real-time experiments confirm DPM preserves telehaptic quality in congestion.

Abstract

Telehaptic applications involve delay-sensitive multimedia communication between remote locations with distinct Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for different media components. These QoS constraints pose a variety of challenges, especially when the communication occurs over a shared network, with unknown and time-varying cross-traffic. In this work, we propose a transport layer congestion control protocol for telehaptic applications operating over shared networks, termed as dynamic packetization module (DPM). DPM is a lossless, network-aware protocol which tunes the telehaptic packetization rate based on the level of congestion in the network. To monitor the network congestion, we devise a novel network feedback module, which communicates the end-to-end delays encountered by the telehaptic packets to the respective transmitters with negligible overhead. Via extensive simulations, we show that DPM meets the QoS requirements of telehaptic applications over a wide range of network cross-traffic conditions. We also report qualitative results of a real-time telepottery experiment with several human subjects, which reveal that DPM preserves the quality of telehaptic activity even under heavily congested network scenarios. Finally, we compare the performance of DPM with several previously proposed telehaptic communication protocols and demonstrate that DPM outperforms these protocols.