An experimental study of supporting collaborative haptic interaction in distributed virtual environments over wireless networks

This paper presents an experimental investigation into a new peer-to-peer wireless network architecture for real time telehaptic operation in distributed virtual environments (DVEs). The new peer-to-peer architecture is able to support haptic interactions over different wireless network architecture. Experiments have been conducted to show the performance of different wireless architecture, i. e. wireless-B/G/N. Experiments have also been conducted to investigate the performance of this architecture. Findings of the study are presented in this paper and it shows the challenges in conducting haptic collaboration over wireless IP networks. This is especially true when the wireless hops increase. The wireless channel condition varies over time due to such factors as channel characteristics, the PHY scheme selected, time-varying interference, and channel width for the particular wireless architecture. (6 pages)