Are Today's Video Communication Solutions Ready for the Tactile Internet?

Abstract

The Tactile Internet defines novel requirements for mobile communication, most notably ultra-low end-to-end delay. Sensors, actuators, processing pipelines, protocol stacks and display devices need to undergo major changes to comply with the radical latency requirements. In this paper, we show that today's video communication solutions, including cameras, codecs and displays are not yet ready for the Tactile Internet. We measure a glass-to-glass (G2G) delay between 120 and 386 milliseconds for commercially available video solutions for conversational services and roughly 50 milliseconds for augmented reality and teleoperation applications. Besides the analysis of existing video communication solutions we describe the delay behaviour of our prototype ultra-low-delay video system, which achieves a mean G2G delay of 19.18 milliseconds, including encoding and decoding. This is achieved with off the shelf hardware. As a second contribution, for the development of future low delay video transmission systems, we present an easy-to-use G2G delay measurement application for Android devices. The application connects to an inexpensive, highly precise measurement system via bluetooth, guides the user through the measurement process and enables data post processing and sharing.