  The development of communication protocols for teleoperation with force
feedback (generally known as telehaptics) has gained widespread interest over
the past decade. Several protocols have been proposed for performing telehaptic
interaction over shared networks. However, a comprehensive analysis of the
impact of network cross-traffic on telehaptic streams, and the feasibility of
Quality of Service (QoS) compliance is lacking in the literature. In this
paper, we seek to fill this gap. Specifically, we explore the QoS experienced
by two classes of telehaptic protocols on shared networks - Constant Bitrate
(CBR) protocols and adaptive sampling based protocols, accounting for CBR as
well as TCP cross-traffic. Our treatment of CBR-based telehaptic protocols is
based on a micro-analysis of the interplay between TCP and CBR flows on a
shared bottleneck link, which is broadly applicable for performance evaluation
of CBR-based media streaming applications. Based on our analytical
characterization of telehaptic QoS, and via extensive simulations and real
network experiments, we formulate a set of sufficient conditions for telehaptic
QoS-compliance. These conditions provide guidelines for designers of telehaptic
protocols, and for network administrators to configure their networks for
guaranteeing QoS-compliant telehaptic communication.
