Quality of Service issues for Distributed Virtual Environments with Haptic Interfaces

Currently all interactions that occur between ourselves and communications networks involve only two senses (aural and visual). Moreover all these networks, including the Internet, have been designed to carry application information pertaining to these two senses (e.g. telephony, video, graphics, and text). It is clear that by introducing into networks the ability to carry information relating to other senses opens up an enormous potential for new and improved applications. However it is also clear that the network service needed to support other senses such as touch (haptics) will be significantly different from that which currently exists. The effective transmission of the sense of touch (haptics) presents a significant challenge to the current Internet architecture. Haptic information originates from a different human sense; therefore the Quality of Service (QoS) required to support this type of traffic is significantly different from that used to support conventional real-time traffic such as voice or video. To date there has been no specific provision of QoS parameters for haptic interaction, and each type of network impairment has different (and severe) impacts on the user's haptic experience. This paper describes some of the issues and challenges that are presented whenever remote haptic interactions with virtual environments are considered, and identifies a number of techniques, in the network and in the end applications, that can be used to improve performance of such systems.