QoE-Delay Modeling for Haptic Communications with Stabilizing Control Schemes

Abstract

In order to quantify the user’s experience of haptic interactions in networked teleoperation systems, we design a virtual environment with computer-aid design and conduct extensive subjective tests to explore the relationship among the quality of user’s experience, communication delay and control schemes (which maintain the stability of networked teleoperation systems). Four kinds of control schemes are studied in this paper, including (1) Wave Variable (WV) approach; (2) Time Domain Passivity Approach (TDPA); (3) Input-to-State Stable (ISS) approach; and (4) Model Mediated Teleoperation (MMT). These schemes are combined with perceptual dead zone coding to reduce the packet rate of haptic data. Through subjective tests, a QoE-delay model is obtained for haptic interaction in networked teleoperation. This model can be considered as a quality metric to guide the joint optimization of communication and control aiming at achieving the maximal quality of experience (QoE) for haptic interactions. Furthermore, we take the MAC layer multi-stream scheduling as an example to illustrate how to utilize the proposed QoE-delay model as a key metric for the resource allocation in haptic communications.