SMOTE: An Intelligent SDN-Based Multi-Objective Traffic Engineering Technique for Telesurgery

Abstract

Recently, telesurgery, as a branch of telemedicine, is growing at great speed. In telesurgery, a remote surgeon can communicate with operating room through communication networks in order to perform remote operation. Because human life is at stake in telesurgery, it is necessary to implement appropriate Traffic Engineering (TE) techniques to manage and route telesurgical data traffics over communication networks. Implementing proper TE technique can increase Quality of Experience (QoE) for the remote surgeon, and as a result, it increases the accuracy and performance of telesurgery. In recent years, the advent of Software Defined Network (SDN) has facilitated network providers to develop efficient TE methods to guarantee QoE for their customer applications. In this paper, a novel multi-objective TE technique called SMOTE is proposed to guarantee QoE for telesurgery applications over SDN. The goal of this paper is to enable a network administrator to provide a satisfactory remote operation by providing QoE for the remote surgeon. The objectives, which are considered in our proposed method, are the minimization of end-to-end delay and packet loss. SMOTE uses Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II) a well-known multi-objective algorithm, to solve the optimization model for calculating optimal routes between the remote surgeon and the operating room. We conducted comprehensive simulations to evaluate the performance of SMOTE in terms of QoE. Simulation results confirmed that SMOTE guarantees QoE in telesurgery.