Analyzing the behavior of a real-time telerobotic system on IEEE 802.11b wireless networks

A real-time telerobotic system is an example of application where temporal constraints are imposed on media streams delivery (typically video and navigation control). The communication network has to offer an appropriate transport service, making this kind of applications successful. So, we will analyze the feasibility of a real-time navigation system on IEEE 802.11b wireless networks. For that purpose, we have developed a prototype that consists of one autonomous robot equipped with a webcam and an 802.11b network adapter. The control station sends navigation commands to the robot and, at the same time, it is receiving a video stream that shows to the user a frontal view of actual robot location. In this framework, we analyze the end-to-end delays in both the video and navigation dataflows under different network conditions. Also, we measure the impact of several network parameters (mobility, traffic, link quality, etc.) to determine the feasibility of this kind of applications in WLANs.