ViMediaNet: an emulation system for interactive multimedia based telepresence services

The telepresence service (TPS) leverages advanced communication, virtual reality, and cooperative web technologies to provide remote engaged users an immersive experience of being fully present, which are widely used in teleconferencing, remote surgery, and hazardous environment exploration. The common feature of TPS-based applications lies in that the users’ experiences heavily depend on the quality of interactive multimedia services, that is, most deliveries of multimedia contents are mission-critical, as well as time-critical, to ensure the control and operation accuracy for telerobots. Therefore, the delivery performance of multimedia contents over heterogeneous networks becomes the primary concern in the TPS system design, especially for those delay sensitive applications, like remote surgery and environment exploration. In this paper, we incorporate video processing tools with the network simulator to design and implement a joint emulation system, named as the virtual media network (ViMediaNet), through which, the TPS designer can readily deploy the TPS system over a heterogeneous network virtualized by the network emulator, investigate the critical network performance metrics in the multimedia content delivery, such as transmission delay and packet jitter, and observe control results in real time. To verify the capability of ViMediaNet in emulating the real-setting TPS system, we take a mobile device based vision navigation system as an example to evaluate performance impacts of the rate adaptation technology in the telerobot control. The experimental results reveal that the adaptive video streaming is a promising solution to significantly enhance the control accuracy of telerobots in TPS systems.