  The next frontier in communications is teleoperation -- manipulation and
control of remote environments with feedback. Compared to conventional
networked applications, teleoperation poses widely different requirements,
ultra-low latency (ULL) is primary. Realizing ULL communication demands
significant redesign of conventional networking techniques, and the network
infrastructure envisioned for achieving this is termed as Tactile Internet
(TI). The design of the network infrastructure and meaningful performance
metrics are crucial for seamless TI communication. However, existing
performance metrics fall severely short of comprehensively characterizing TI
performance. We take the first step towards bridging this gap. We take Dynamic
Time Warping(DTW) as the basis of our work and identify necessary changes for
characterizing TI performance. Through substantial refinements to DTW, we
design Effective Time- and Value-Offset (ETVO) -- a new method for measuring
the fine-grained performance of TI systems. Through an in-depth objective
analysis, we demonstrate the improvements of ETVO over DTW. Through
human-in-the-loop subjective experiments, we demonstrate how and why existing
QoS and QoE methods fall short of estimating the TI session performance
accurately. Using subjective experiments, we demonstrate the behavior of the
proposed metrics, their ability to match theoretically derived performance, and
finally their ability to reflect user satisfaction in a practical setting. The
results are highly encouraging.
