Toward Reliable End-to-End Communication for Global Cybernetic Avatar Teleoperation

Abstract

The progression of aging and declining birth rates has led to a severe labor shortage, emerging as a critical societal issue globally. Cybernetic avatars (CAs) have been proposed as a promising solution to address this challenge by extending human physical, cognitive, and perceptual capabilities through ICT and robotics technologies. Specifically, teleoperators (Tos) can control CAs to provide services to local service users (SUs) without being physically present, enabling broader social participation, particularly for individuals with disabilities. To achieve this, ensuring stable end-to-end (E2E) communication quality is essential to maintaining seamless interaction between TOs and SUs. From a wireless communication perspective, local network reliability enhancements such as private 5G have been introduced to improve communication stability. However, for global service deployment, minimizing E2E delay and jitter is crucial. This study investigates E2E communication quality across various remote communication environments, analyzing its characteristics in both domestic and international contexts. Our findings indicate that global communication exhibits characteristic and significant delay and jitter variations, influenced by communication carrier or network conditions. These results demonstrate that improving the reliability of local wireless environments alone is insufficient for stabilizing E2E communication. To address this challenge, we propose a reliability-ensuring platform incorporating support nodes within the E2E network. Support nodes continuously monitor communication quality, detect increased jitter or packet loss, and dynamically adjust routing and buffering mechanisms to mitigate their impact. By integrating support nodes, we aim to actively manage network fluctuations, ensuring stable E2E communication surpassing the limitations of reliability improvements of locally well-organized network. This paper also presents an analysis of E2E communication quality across different environments and demonstrates the effectiveness of jitter buffering in a testbed replicating characteristic delay patterns, validating the proposed approach for enhancing the reliability of CA teleoperation in global networks.