A Performance Evaluation of a Hybrid Multicast Transport Protocol for a Distributed Collaborative Virtual Simulation of a Brain Tumor Tele-Surgery Class of Applications

Haptic interfaces have been designed for brain surgery simulation may prove to be especially useful for training surgeons to conduct minimally invasive procedures and remote surgery using tele-operators. However, it well known that collaborative, haptic, audio and visual environments (C-HAVE) suffer from setbacks due to network delay, scalability, reliability and synchronization problem when the users are geographically distributed. In this paper, we focus upon a Brain Tumor Tele-Surgery application that is based on closely coupled and highly synchronized haptic tasks that require a high-level of coordination among the participants. We considered four main protocols: the synchronous collaboration transport protocol (SCTP), the selective reliable transmission protocol (SRTP), the reliable multicast transport protocol (RMTP) and the scalable reliable multicast (SRM) and presented a hybrid protocol that is able to satisfy all the CVE and C-HAVE requirements and discuss its implementation using brain tumor tele-surgery application as a case study.