On the feasibility of telesurgery over software defined networks

Telesurgery is a form of surgery in which a remote surgeon can perform surgical operation on a patient over a distance using robots. Due to human life is at stake, telesurgery is a high risk operation. Therefore, safety is one of the most important issues in telesurgery. Implementing appropriate mechanisms and protocols over communication network in order to transmit telesurgical traffics effectively, can improve the safety of telesurgery. The limitations of traditional IP-based protocols make it difficult to provide quality of service (QoS) for telesurgery. Fortunately, the advent of software defined network (SDN) facilitates to provide and guarantee QoS for most applications such as telesurgery. This paper investigates the feasibility of telesurgery over SDN, and proposes an SDN-based network architecture for the implementation of telesurgery. The proposed architecture considers all communication aspects of telesurgery and manages telesurgical traffics by using an efficient traffic engineering (TE) technique. To prove the effectiveness of our proposed architecture and TE method, we conducted extensive simulations for telesurgery application. Experimental results confirm that the proposed solution can be practically used for telesurgery and improve the performance of telesurgery in terms of QoS parameters. © 2018, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.