Adaptive Information Coding for Secure and Reliable Telesurgery Communications

Telesurgical Robot Systems (TRS) have been the focus of research in academic, military and commercial domains for many years. Recently, a new communications protocol (ITP) based on UDP has been specified to allow interoperability of these surgical robots and surgical robot controllers. However, security and reliability of telesurgery communication are still unaddressed issues. Telesurgery can be deployed on various networks of different delay and loss characteristics as well as privacy requirements. Adaptive and light-weight confidentiality and reliability protocols are necessary for achieving information protection and quality for TRS communications. The off-the-shelf solutions such as [6], [14] incur fixed overhead delay, which may not satisfy the real-time requirements for telesurgery. In this paper we present a novel approach that uses information coding to integrate both light-weight privacy and adaptive reliability in a single protocol. We prove that the offered security is equivalent to the existing AES-based crypto systems with long keys (up to 256-bit) but with significantly less computational overhead. Using the same encoded stream, we also investigate dynamic adjustment of the information coding parameters to minimize the impact of packet loss and network delays while maintaining the required confidentiality level. Our evaluation shows that the proposed scheme can achieve the target reliability with high accuracy and reasonably low traffic redundancy and computational overhead. Although our application domain is telesurgery, this technique can be used in other similar cyber-physical application domains.