Study of the effects of using some QoS mechanisms on haptic transmission - Using OPNET Modeler

Recently, there has been significant progress in incorporating using the human sense of touch in the virtual world (Haptics) as well as in transmitting this kind of data. Moreover, all types of networks, including the Internet, have been designed to mainly support only the traditional multi-modal media such as voice and video. Therefore, haptic traffic transmission over these networks will have different reactions to network impairments such as network delay, delay jitter, packet loss, and throughput. It is recognized that using Quality of Service (QoS) architectures will definitely reduce these network impairments and improve the overall performance. A related challenge arises from the fact that the QoS required to support this type of traffic is significantly different from that used to support conventional real-time traffic. This work presents a comprehensive study about the effects of using some QoS techniques in haptic transmission. It considers four mechanisms Class-Based Weighted Fair Queuing (CBWFQ), Priority Queuing (PQ), Random Early Detection (RED), and Weighted Random Early Detection (WRED). The emphasis is given to the analysis of results in terms of packet end-to-end delay. These studies are carried out using OPNET Modeler. Some recommendations about good practices when using these QoS mechanisms have been delivered.