Millimeter Wave meets Edge Computing for Mobile VR with High-Fidelity 8K Scalable 360° Video

We investigate a novel multiple user scalable 8K 360° video mobile virtual reality arcade streaming system that enables high reliability and immersion fidelity, and low interactive latency, by the synergistic integration of scalable 360° content, expected VR user viewport modeling, millimeter wave (mmWave) communication and network edge computation capability. The high data rate mmWave link is used to transmit the video content of the expected user 360 viewport at enhanced quality. To compensate for the dynamic nature of mmWave links and prospective expected viewport characterization error, we integrate a fall back transmission based on Wi-Fi broadcast of a baseline representation of the 360 panorama to all users. In our proposed transmission strategy, the expected viewport content can be sent as raw or encoded at different qualities, which enhances the end-to-end performance, by exploiting effective trade-offs between communication and computation latency at the receiving user. With the aim of maximizing the minimum VR immersion fidelity across all users, we investigate the joint optimization of the mmWave access point (AP) to user association, the data rate for the encoded portion of the 360 viewport content that is to be transmitted, and computation resource allocation. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system can achieve significant improvement in delivered VR user immersion fidelity and quality of experience relative to a state-of-the-art reference method that leverages Wi-Fi transmission only.