Content Aware Burst Assembly – Supporting Telesurgery and Telemedicine in Optical Burst Switching Networks

Henry Orosco, Lei Wang, Yuhua Chen

The emerging Telemedicine and Telesurgery technologies allow patients to share medical experts remotely through communication networks. However, network bandwidth, network latency and jitter (variation of latency), are the obstacles to the widespread use of this technology remotely. Optical Burst Switching (OBS) networks greatly expand network bandwidth in existing network infrastructure by utilizing multiple DWDM channels within a single fiber, enabling high bandwidth applications. However, the burst assembly process in OBS networks introduces latency and jitter, making it unsuitable for high bandwidth, latency sensitive applications such as telesurgery and telemedicine. In this paper, we propose a content aware burst assembly scheme which dynamically adjusts the burst assembly parameters based on the content being assembled. The proposed content aware burst assembly minimizes the latency and jitter within a video frame, as well as across the left-view and right-view frames for 3D vision generation. Simulation results have shown that the proposed scheme can effectively reduce the latency and jitter experienced by video streams, making OBS a promising candidate for supporting telesurgery and telemedicine applications.

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