An Experimental Study of Haptic Positional Synchronization in TCP/IP Networks

Traditional Internet is based on the best effort approach, which allow connections for peer-to-peer communications with different characteristics, such as VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), VoD (Video on Demand) and data transmission services. In contrast, the increasing demands for variety multimedia applications for future Internet. Therefore, all multimedia services should have Quality of Service (QoS) to support real-time data transmissions in the future Internet multimedia services. This paper presents an experimental investigation into the real-time tele-haptic operation via TCP/IP networks. The experimental results show many challenges in conducting haptic traffic over TCP/IP networks. The UDP jitter, delay and packet loss, these factors will seriously affect user experience under haptic interaction. It is because, jitter, delay and pack loss may lose the positional synchronization between master and slave haptic devices, which will cause haptic communication instability. Thus this paper describe the haptic interaction in order to compare the real-time X-position discrepancies between master and slave haptic devices as the mean opinion score (MOS) over TCP/IP networks. Keywords—PHANTOM Omni, Haptic, Packet delay, Quality of Serivce, Force Feedback