Setting the Yardstick: A Quantitative Metric for Effectively Measuring Tactile Internet
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The next frontier in communications is the telemanipulation of remote environments. Compared to conventional network-based applications, telemanipulation poses widely different requirements, which demand a significant redesign of conventional networking techniques as well as their performance metrics. Telemanipulation along with a host of other applications requiring transportation under extremely low latencies is termed as Tactile Internet (TI). To support TI, enormous advancements are being made to improve network techniques. On the contrary, performance metrics have barely garnered any research attention. The lack of metrics majorly impedes the overall progress of TI. In this paper, we present our first step towards developing a quantitative metric for TI. We propose a method that characterizes TI in an end-to-end fashion to obtain fine-grained performance in terms of delay and precision. We take Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) as the basis of our work and identify its shortcomings for evaluating TI. To circumvent them, we build upon DTW and propose two new concepts: Effective Time-Offset (ETO) and Effective Value-Offset (EVO). The primary strength of the proposed concepts, together referred to as ETVO, lies in the fact that they can quantitatively characterize the performance of any end-to-end TI system in a manner that is agnostic to underlying implementation details. We present the mathematical framework involved in the design of ETVO. Through rigorous experiments conducted on a realistic TI setup, we compare the performances of DTW and ETVO. Our findings show that ETVO results in 62.5x less time noise for up to 34 compared to DTW.
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