Interconnecting Haptic Interfaces with High Update Rates through the Internet

Real-time transferring of the haptic sense over the Internet is quite a challenging task. This paper outlines the proposed protocols for transferring haptic streams over the Internet. Moreover, it describes the Quality of Service requirements that a network has to fulfill in order to successfully use haptic interfaces with high update rates over the Internet. Extensive simulations and experiments for the performance evaluation of transport protocols for real-time transferring haptic data are carried out. Complements between simulation and real world experiments are discussed. The metrics that are measured for the performance evaluation are delay, jitter, throughput, efficiency, packet loss and one proposed by the authors, packet arrival deviation. The simulation tests reveal which protocols could be used for the transfer of real-time haptic data over the Internet.