Traffic engineering for emerging telerobotic services

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Canada is emerging as a world leader in Telemedicine and Telerobotic  services. The world's first telerobotic-assisted operation over the Internet was performed in Canada in 2003, between Dr. Anvari of McMaster University's Center for Minimal Access Surgery (CMAS) in Hamilton, and a patient in North Bay Ontario, over a network using CISCO MPLS and VPN technologies managed by Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE). The Canadian Space Agency and the US NASA have also partnered with McMaster's CMAS in a project entitled 'NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operation' - (NEEMO-9), with the goal to assess the prospect of Telerobotic Surgery in future space missions. Telerobotics is also being exploited in automated mines in northern Canada, and there is speculation of high-pressure under-water Telerobotic Mining, as a means of recovering more resources from harsh environments with less risk to human life.While emerging Telerobotic Services may have a potentially significant impact on our way of life and our future economy, there are several key challenges before such services can be delivered on a wide scale basis. The control of telerobotic systems is highly sensitive to the network delay: a small fixed network delay can usually be tolerated in the control system, while any highly variable network delay will usually render telerobotic control ineffective. Traffic Engineering can be informally defined as the use of computer models to plan, deploy and manage end-to-end connections over the Internet, while meeting upper and lower bounds on the end-to-end bandwidth, delay, delay jitter, reliability and availability. This discovery grant will explore the topic of 'Traffic Engineering' over wired and wireless networks to support important emerging Telemedicine and Telerobotic services. In particular, this application will focus on switch scheduling algorithms to eliminate virtually all avoidable variable delays (delay jitter) in the Internet.