Millimeter Wave and Free-space-optics for Future Dual-connectivity 6DOF Mobile Multi-user VR Streaming

Authors

Jacob Chakareski, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Mahmudur Khan, York College of Pennsylvania
Tanguy Ropitault, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Steve Blandino, National Institute of Standards and Technology

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-6-2023

Abstract

Dual-connectivity streaming is a key enabler of next-generation six Degrees Of Freedom (6DOF) Virtual Reality (VR) scene immersion. Indeed, using conventional sub-6 GHz WiFi only allows to reliably stream a low-quality baseline representation of the VR content, while emerging high-frequency communication technologies allow to stream in parallel a high-quality user viewport-specific enhancement representation that synergistically integrates with the baseline representation to deliver high-quality VR immersion. We investigate holistically as part of an entire future VR streaming system two such candidate emerging technologies, Free Space Optics (FSO) and millimeter-Wave (mmWave), that benefit from a large available spectrum to deliver unprecedented data rates. We analytically characterize the key components of the envisioned dual-connectivity 6DOF VR streaming system that integrates in addition edge computing and scalable 360° video tiling, and we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the immersion fidelity delivered by the system, given the WiFi and mmWave/FSO link rates, and the computing capabilities of the edge server and the users' VR headsets. This optimization problem is mixed integer programming of high complexity and we formulate a geometric programming framework to compute the optimal solution at low complexity. We carry out simulation experiments to assess the performance of the proposed system using actual 6DOF navigation traces from multiple mobile VR users that we collected. Our results demonstrate that our system considerably advances the traditional state of the art and enables streaming of 8K-120 frames-per-second (fps) 6DOF content at high fidelity.

Identifier

85163837938 (Scopus)

Publication Title

ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1145/3544494

e-ISSN

15516865

ISSN

15516857

Issue

2

Volume

19

Grant

CCF-2031881

Fund Ref

National Science Foundation

Recommended Citation

Chakareski, Jacob; Khan, Mahmudur; Ropitault, Tanguy; and Blandino, Steve, "Millimeter Wave and Free-space-optics for Future Dual-connectivity 6DOF Mobile Multi-user VR Streaming" (2023). Faculty Publications. 1929.
https://digitalcommons.njit.edu/fac_pubs/1929