Towards Standardization of Haptic Handshake for Tactile Internet: A WebRTC-Based Implementation

The rapidly rising interest in Tactile Internet (TI) has lead to the inception of IEEE 1918.1 working group (WG) with a primary objective of envisioning and standardizing various modules crucial for the realization of TI. One of the several core activities of the WG is to standardize haptic codecs for human-in-the-loop applications. This subsumes standardization of haptic handshake scheme for orchestration between heterogeneous nodes for seamless TI interaction. To this end, we present a novel haptic handshake protocol that facilitates exchange of haptic metadata between TI nodes through Tactile Internet Metadata (TIM) scheme. Through WebRTC-based implementation and real haptic devices, we provide a proof of concept of the proposed protocol. The mean and the standard deviation of the handshake latency is measured to be 47.25 ms and 23.38 ms, respectively, thereby making it a strong candidate for employment in TI applications. Finally, we shed light on future refinements to our implementation.