  Haptic sensory feedback has been shown to complement the visual and auditory
senses, improve user performance and provide a greater sense of togetherness in
collaborative and interactive virtual environments. However, we are faced with
numerous challenges when deploying these systems over the present day Internet.
The most significant of these challenges are the network performance
limitations of the Wide Area Networks. In this paper, we offer a structured
examination of the current challenges in the deployment of haptic-based
distributed systems by analyzing the recent advances in the understanding of
these challenges and the progress that has been made to overcome them.
