Quality-of-Experience in Human-in-the-Loop Haptic Communications

Quality-of-Experience in Human-in-the-Loop Haptic Communications

LIU Qian1 and ZHAO Tiesong2

(1. Dept. of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, Liaoning 116024, China; 

2. College of Physics and Information Engineering, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, Fujian 350108, China)

Abstract: With the worldwide rapid development of 5G networks, haptic communications, a key use case of the 5G, has attracted increasing attentions nowadays. Its human-in-the-loop nature makes quality of experience (QoE) the leading performance indicator of the system design. A vast number of high quality works were published on user-level, application-level and network-level QoE-oriented designs in haptic communications. In this paper, we present an overview of the recent research activities in this progressive research area. We start from the QoE modeling of human haptic perceptions, followed by the application-level QoE management mechanisms based on these QoE models. High fidelity haptic communications require an orchestra of QoE designs in the application level and the quality of service (QoS) support in the network level. Hence, we also review the state-of-the-art QoS-related QoE management strategies in haptic communications, especially the QoS-related QoE modeling which guides the resource allocation design of the communication network. In addition to a thorough survey of the literature, we also present the open challenges in this research area. We believe that our review and findings in this paper not only provide a timely summary of prevailing research in this area, but also help to inspire new QoE-related research opportunities in haptic communications.

Keywords: QoE; Human-in-the-Loop; haptic communications; kinesthetic signals; tactile signals; haptic