ETVO: Effectively Measuring Tactile Internet with Experimental Validation

Abstract

The next frontier in communications is teleoperation -manipulation and control of remote environments with feedback. Compared to conventional networked applications, teleoperation poses widely different requirements, ultra-low latency (ULL) is primary. Realizing ULL communication demands significant redesign of conventional networking techniques, and the network infrastructure envisioned for achieving this is termed as Tactile Internet (TI). The design of the network infrastructure and meaningful performance metrics are crucial for seamless TI communication. However, existing performance metrics fall severely short of comprehensively characterizing TI performance. We take the first step towards bridging this gap. We take Dynamic Time Warping(DTW) as the basis of our work and identify necessary changes for characterizing TI performance. Through substantial refinements to DTW, we design Effective Time-and Value-Offset (ETVO) -a new method for measuring the fine-grained performance of TI systems. Through an in-depth objective analysis, we demonstrate the improvements of ETVO over DTW. Through human-in-the-loop subjective experiments, we demonstrate how and why existing QoS and QoE methods fall short of estimating the TI session performance accurately. Using subjective experiments, we demonstrate the behavior of the proposed metrics, their ability to match theoretically derived performance, and finally their ability to reflect user satisfaction in a practical setting. The results are highly encouraging.

Towards Enabling High-Five Over WiFi

“…From the standpoint of RMSE, the performance improvement of NoBuS reveals that fast synchronization between operator and teleoperator is way more crucial for high quality TI communication than maximizing the number of transmitted samples. This aligns very well with the claims made in [3] and hence highlights the need to focus on providing ULL service guarantees for TI applications rather than ultra-reliability. This opens up several opportunities and serves as an important insight for designing efficient TI systems.…”

“…Hence, in this work, we focus on the ULL requirement of TI. Note that in this work, we provide objective measurements that align with the claims on reliability requirement made in [3]. This further justifies our decision to focus on ULL requirement only.…”

“…However, unlike the ULL requirement, which is experimentally quantified, the ultra-reliability requirement has no reasonable substantiation and is only a speculation of the necessary performance guarantee. In fact, a recent work [3] that involved rigorous subjective experiments reveals that even a significant amount (nearly 50 %) of packet losses barely introduces any disturbance to the users. This indicates the possibility of ultrareliability being an overkill for at least some TI applications that have the same characteristics as the TI task investigated in work [3].…”

“…In fact, a recent work [3] that involved rigorous subjective experiments reveals that even a significant amount (nearly 50 %) of packet losses barely introduces any disturbance to the users. This indicates the possibility of ultrareliability being an overkill for at least some TI applications that have the same characteristics as the TI task investigated in work [3]. Extending this observation to a broader range of TI applications necessitates further systematic studies.…”