Transport Protocols for Remote Programming of Network Robots within the context of Telelaboratories for Education: A Comparative Analysis

Within the context of tele-laboratories for education the use of the Internet as communication media permits any researcher/student to perform remote experiments in a simple and reliable manner. Moreover, this situation introduces many interesting issues like network protocols for Internet robots, the effects of variable bandwidth and time-delays on telerobotics, etc. In this paper we present a comparative analysis of using several Internet transport protocols when performing a remote experiment within the UJI Industrial Telelaboratory. TCP, UDP, Trinomial and TEAR protocols are analyzed using the NS2 simulator. Conclusions show a set of characteristics the authors of this paper consider very important when designing an end-to-end congestion control transport protocol for Internet Telerobotics. These ideas are the basis for the definition of the SNRTP (simple network robot transport protocol).