An Overlay Network Transport Service for Teleoperation Systems

In real-time Internet based teleoperation systems, the Internet is the communication medium through which the operator sends control commands to the robot and receives feedback. Teleoperation systems support robotic control commands, video, audio, haptic feedback, and other sensory information, which are called supermedia. Traditional transport services of the Internet may not be able to meet the timely transmission requirements and dynamic priorities of supermedia streams. This paper aims to design an efficient and reliable transport service for teleoperation applications. Built upon multiple disjoint paths in overlay networks, Supermedia TRansport for teleoperations over Overlay Networks (STRON) uses forward error correction encodings to reduce end-to-end latency for the transmission of supermedia streams. Network routes and encoding redundancy may be adjusted dynamically to meet the QoS requirements of the supermedia streams in the face of networking performance degradation. At the cost of minimal encoding computation, the system achieves better performance in transporting supermedia streams than available transport services and at the same time remains friendly to other Internet traffic. Evaluations using PlanetLab available bandwidth traces show that STRON can significantly reduce latency.