On secure and resilient telesurgery communications over unreliable networks

Abstract

Telesurgical Robot Systems (TRSs) address mission critical operations emerging in extreme fields such as battlefields, underwater, and disaster territories. The lack of wirelined communication infrastructure in such fields makes the use of wireless technologies including satellite and ad-hoc networks inevitable. TRSs over wireless environments pose unique challenges such as preserving a certain reliability threshold, adhering some maximum tolerable delay, and providing various security measures depending on the nature of the operation and communication environment. In this study we present a novel approach that uses information coding to integrate both light-weight privacy and adaptive reliability in a single protocol called Secure and Statistically Reliable UDP (SSR-UDP). We prove that the offered security is equivalent to the existing AES-based long key crypto systems, yet, with significantly less computational overhead. Additionally, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme can meet high reliability and delay requirements of TRS applications in highly lossy environments while optimizing the bandwidth use. Our proposed SSR-UDP protocol can also be utilized in other similar cyber-physical wireless application domains.