A new adaptive traffic engineering method for telesurgery using ACO algorithm over Software Defined Networks

Summary Introduction In the past decades, telemedicine has attracted much attention due to its usefulness for delivering medical services from remote location. One of the most important parts of telemedicine is telesurgery, in which a surgeon performs surgery on the patient from remote location by using telecommunication networks. Due to the surgeon needs to watch the patient side transmitted video with high quality; it is necessary to provide fast and suitable communication path between the surgeon and patient. Emerging Software Defined Network (SDN) as a new network paradigm facilitated Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning in many applications. Decoupling data plane from control plane in SDN, helps to manage based on end users requirements. This paper proposes a new heuristic traffic engineering method for telesurgery application using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm. Patients and methods This paper models QoS provisioning in Telesurgery as a Constraint Shortest Path (CSP) linear programming problem. Moreover, due to NP-completeness of CSP problem, this paper proposes a solver method using ACO algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper which investigates QoS provisioning for telesurgery in SDN. Results Results of performance evaluation showed that the proposed method is better than baseline method. The proposed method improves all three important QoS parameters, average End-to-End delay, packet loss ratio and PSNR with values of 56.3%, 50.5% and 1.33, respectively. Discussion providing QoS in telesurgery applications is one of the most challenging issues. By leveraging the capability of SDN, we can develop appropriate mechanisms to guarantee QoS requirements in critical applications such as Telesurgery. Conclusion Using SDN together with optimization models such as CSP for providing QoS in Telesurgery can improve the quality of the received video in an operation room. This mechanism causes increment in the performance of Telesurgery.