A Machine Learning Framework for Handling Delayed/Lost Packets in Tactile Internet Remote Robotic Surgery

Remote robotic surgery, one of the most interesting 5G-enabled Tactile Internet applications, requires an ultra-low latency of 1 ms and high reliability of 99.999%. Communication disruptions such as packet loss and delay in remote robotic surgery can prevent messages between the surgeon and patient from arriving within the required deadline. In this paper, we advocate for scalable Gaussian process regression (GPR) to predict the contents of delayed and/or lost messages. Specifically, two kernel versions of the sequential randomized low-rank and sparse matrix factorization method (l1-SRLSMF and SRLSMF) are proposed to scale GPR and address the issue of delayed and/or lost data in the training dataset. Given that the standard eigen decomposition for online GPR covariance update is cost-prohibitive, we employ incremental eigen decomposition in l1-SRLSMF and SRLSMF GPR methods. Simulations were conducted to evaluate the performance of our proposed l1-SRLSMF and SRLSMF GPR methods to compensate for the detrimental impacts of excessive delay and packet loss associated with 5G-enabled Tactile Internet remote robotic surgery. The results demonstrate that our proposed framework can outperform state-of-the-art approaches in terms of haptic data generalization performance. Finally, we assess the proposed framework’s ability to meet the Tactile Internet requirement for remote robotic surgery and discuss future research directions.