Statistical analysis and prediction of round trip delay for Internet-based teleoperation

For Internet based teleoperation, the most difficult and distinct part is the unavoidable time-varying delays between human operators and remote robotic devices. Currently, the RTTs (roundtrip time or we can call it delay) are mostly treated as given conditions in application level. In this paper, after a statistical analysis of the huge RTT time series collected densely in a few continuous days using some linear and nonlinear methods, it is found that the RTT time series has a rather high degree of linear correlation between observations. It could be inferred that there is no high nonlinear dependence among observations. Thus, RTT is linearly predictable. We use the MEP (maximum entropy principle) method developed to predict next RTT value (one step ahead) and the results confirm our findings.