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The geographically distributed systems which share information (control signals, feedback, and output signals) between distant oriented users through a closed control loop spread all over the network is termed as Networked Control System (NCS) (Sakti & Prajitno, 2017). NCS provides flexible architectural network design to share information and command the systems over the network. Low installation and preservation cost, integration tractability, widespread reachability are few features of NCS that expands its area of applicability such as space command and control applications, industrial automation and process control, tele-operation and tele-surgery, agricultural monitoring and quality control, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and automated traffic monitoring and control are some of the societal beneficial applications (G. P. Liu et al., 2005; K. Liu et al., 2014; F. Y. Wang & Liu, 2008; Xia et al., 2015).
People in today's era are becoming more and more vigilant in regard to their health. And the recent Covid19 pandemic intensified the coparcenary of NCS to bring forth an interdisciplinary dimension that explicable the possibility of telesurgery and tele-diagnosis of patients in the field of healthcare and medicine. Telesurgery is a time-sensitive application of a networked control system so, guaranteed time control signals are of utmost priority (Gupta & Chow, 2008; Kumar et al., 2019; Sharma et al., 2018). It integrates multiple complex devices with high-end technology that involves the complex machinery being controlled by surgeons to operate accordingly (Miao et al., 2018; Sahu et al., 2020). The types of equipment involved are very precisely assembled to use for marginal invasive surgeries across the world. The concept of telesurgery is exceptional to the conventional surgery made by a surgeon. The telesurgery is performed by a doctor without touching a patient through a highly reliable network that communicates information signals between the master console installed with the doctor and a salve robot mounted with various robotic arms at the patient end (Fan & Sharma, 2021; Meng et al., 2004). The master console is equipped with a position and motion control panel and feedback monitoring console to observe the real-time condition of the patient. The slave robot is installed with a moving/rotating robotic arm, camera sensors, haptic sensors that facilitate the doctor for remote diagnosis. The doctor located at a distant position to the patient communicates with the slave robot through the master console (Haidegger et al., 2011; Sharma & Kumar, 2019). A diagrammatical procedure of telesurgery is presented in Fig. 1.
Figure 1. Overview of NCS based telesurgery
Once the decussation position is marked, the robotic arm fitted with surgical tools and camera starts performing the various surgical procedures like cutting, stop bleeding, and suture of wounds. Although NCS has given credibility to impassable processes like telesurgery, some inadequacies hinder its widespread. Though, the involvement of control of components over the network introduces new challenges too. The distribution of intelligence, integration of components, time delay in transmission and computation of control signals, the disappearance of data packets are major issues that can be viewed in NCS (Farajiparvar et al., 2020; Pavitra et al., 2020; Ren et al., 2021).