Zhenhui Yuan

Zexin Deng, Zhenhui Yuan, Tian Lu et al.

Real-time video streaming is crucial in surgical teleoperation, yet reproducible evaluation under realistic network impairments remains limited. This paper presents VISTA, a benchmark designed to study how impairments along the forward video path affect received video quality, temporal continuity, and human task performance. VISTA employs Linux Traffic Control with NetEm and a Gilbert-Elliott loss model to emulate five network conditions: Hospital LAN, 5G Urban, 4G Rural, LEO Satellite, and GEO Satellite. The benchmark integrates a standardised peg transfer task with synchronized measurements of network quality of service (QoS), objective video quality (PSNR, SSIM, and VMAF), and temporal continuity through freeze rate, while maintaining a stable reverse control channel. Across 375 experimental trials, network degradation substantially reduced teleoperation performance: success rate decreased from 97% in Hospital LAN to 79% in 5G Urban, 35% in 4G Rural, 71% in LEO Satellite, and 12% in GEO Satellite, while mean task completion time for successful trials increased from 80 s in Hospital LAN to 117 s in 5G Urban, 211 s in 4G Rural, 152 s in LEO Satellite, and 255 s in GEO Satellite. These findings show that network impairments have a direct impact on task completion and success in surgical teleoperation, and provide a reproducible basis for evaluating teleoperation video under realistic network constraints. Source code available at https://github.com/Dzxx623/VISTA.

Zexin Deng, Zhenhui Yuan, Longhao Zou

Telerobotic technologies are becoming increasingly essential in fields such as remote surgery, nuclear decommissioning, and space exploration. Reliable datasets and testbeds are essential for evaluating telerobotic system performance prior to real-world deployment. However, there is a notable lack of datasets that capture the impact of network delays, as well as testbeds that realistically model the communication link between the operator and the robot. This paper introduces TeleSim, a network-aware teleoperation dataset and testbed designed to assess the performance of telerobotic applications under diverse network conditions. TeleSim systematically collects performance data from fine manipulation tasks executed under three predefined network quality tiers: High, Medium, and Low. Each tier is characterized through controlled settings of bandwidth, latency, jitter, and packet loss. Using OMNeT++ for precise network simulation, we record a wide range of metrics, including completion time, success rates, video quality indicators (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM)), and quality of service (QoS) parameters. TeleSim comprises 300 experimental trials, providing a robust benchmark for evaluating teleoperation systems across heterogeneous network scenarios. In the worst network condition, completion time increases by 221.8% and success rate drops by 64%. Our findings reveal that network degradation leads to compounding negative impacts, notably reduced video quality and prolonged task execution, highlighting the need for adaptive, resilient teleoperation protocols. The full dataset and testbed software are publicly available on our GitHub repository: https://github.com/ConnectedRoboticsLab and YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/Fz_1iOYe104.

Jeffrey Redondo, Zhenhui Yuan, Nauman Aslam et al.

One effective way to optimize the offloading process is by minimizing the transmission time. This is particularly true in a Vehicular Adhoc Network (VANET) where vehicles frequently download and upload High-definition (HD) map data which requires constant updates. This implies that latency and throughput requirements must be guaranteed by the wireless system. To achieve this, adjustable contention windows (CW) allocation strategies in the standard IEEE802.11p have been explored by numerous researchers. Nevertheless, their implementations demand alterations to the existing standard which is not always desirable. To address this issue, we proposed a Q-Learning algorithm that operates at the application layer. Moreover, it could be deployed in any wireless network thereby mitigating the compatibility issues. The solution has demonstrated a better network performance with relatively fewer optimization requirements as compared to the Deep Q Network (DQN) and Actor-Critic algorithms. The same is observed while evaluating the model in a multi-agent setup showing higher performance compared to the single-agent setup.

Jeffrey Redondo, Nauman Aslam, Juan Zhang et al.

Nowadays, many machine learning (ML) solutions to improve the wireless standard IEEE802.11p for Vehicular Adhoc Network (VANET) are commonly evaluated in the simulated world. At the same time, this approach could be cost-effective compared to real-world testing due to the high cost of vehicles. There is a risk of unexpected outcomes when these solutions are implemented in the real world, potentially leading to wasted resources. To mitigate this challenge, the hardware-in-the-loop is the way to move forward as it enables the opportunity to test in the real world and simulated worlds together. Therefore, we have developed what we believe is the pioneering hardware-in-the-loop for testing artificial intelligence, multiple services, and HD map data (LiDAR), in both simulated and real-world settings.

Jeffrey Redondo, Nauman Aslam, Juan Zhang et al.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have been used to address the challenging problems in the offloading process of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET). More recently, they have been utilized to improve the dissemination of high-definition (HD) Maps. Nevertheless, implementing solutions such as deep Q-learning (DQN) and Actor-critic at the autonomous vehicle (AV) may lead to an increase in the computational load, causing a heavy burden on the computational devices and higher costs. Moreover, their implementation might raise compatibility issues between technologies due to the required modifications to the standards. Therefore, in this paper, we assess the scalability of an application utilizing a Q-learning single-agent solution in a distributed multi-agent environment. This application improves the network performance by taking advantage of a smaller state, and action space whilst using a multi-agent approach. The proposed solution is extensively evaluated with different test cases involving reward function considering individual or overall network performance, number of agents, and centralized and distributed learning comparison. The experimental results demonstrate that the time latencies of our proposed solution conducted in voice, video, HD Map, and best-effort cases have significant improvements, with 40.4%, 36%, 43%, and 12% respectively, compared to the performances with the single-agent approach.

Jeffrey Redondo, Zhenhui Yuan, Nauman Aslam

High-definition (HD) Map systems will play a pivotal role in advancing autonomous driving to a higher level, thanks to the significant improvement over traditional two-dimensional (2D) maps. Creating an HD Map requires a huge amount of on-road and off-road data. Typically, these raw datasets are collected and uploaded to cloud-based HD map service providers through vehicular networks. Nevertheless, there are challenges in transmitting the raw data over vehicular wireless channels due to the dynamic topology. As the number of vehicles increases, there is a detrimental impact on service quality, which acts as a barrier to a real-time HD Map system for collaborative driving in Autonomous Vehicles (AV). In this paper, to overcome network congestion, a Q-learning coverage-time-awareness algorithm is presented to optimize the quality of service for vehicular networks and HD map updates. The algorithm is evaluated in an environment that imitates a dynamic scenario where vehicles enter and leave. Results showed an improvement in latency for HD map data of $75\%$, $73\%$, and $10\%$ compared with IEEE802.11p without Quality of Service (QoS), IEEE802.11 with QoS, and IEEE802.11p with new access category (AC) for HD map, respectively.

Zhiyao Xu, Dan Zhao, Qingsong Zou et al.

In recent years, as smart home systems have become more widespread, security concerns within these environments have become a growing threat. Currently, most smart home security solutions, such as anomaly detection and behavior prediction models, are trained using fixed datasets that are precollected. However, the process of dataset collection is time-consuming and lacks the flexibility needed to adapt to the constantly evolving smart home environment. Additionally, the collection of personal data raises significant privacy concerns for users. Lately, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a powerful tool for a wide range of tasks across diverse application domains, thanks to their strong capabilities in natural language processing, reasoning, and problem-solving. In this paper, we propose an LLM-based synthetic dataset generation IoTGen framework to enhance the generalization of downstream smart home intelligent models. By generating new synthetic datasets that reflect changes in the environment, smart home intelligent models can be retrained to overcome the limitations of fixed and outdated data, allowing them to better align with the dynamic nature of real-world home environments. Specifically, we first propose a Structure Pattern Perception Compression (SPPC) method tailored for IoT behavior data, which preserves the most informative content in the data while significantly reducing token consumption. Then, we propose a systematic approach to create prompts and implement data generation to automatically generate IoT synthetic data with normative and reasonable properties, assisting task models in adaptive training to improve generalization and real-world performance.