Cellular-Connected Wireless Virtual Reality: Requirements, Challenges, and Solutions

Cellular-connected wireless connectivity provides new opportunities for virtual reality (VR) to offer seamless user experience from anywhere at anytime. To realize this vision, the quality-of-service (QoS) for wireless VR needs to be carefully defined to reflect human perception requirements. In this article, we first identify the primary drivers of VR systems in terms of applications and use cases. We then map the human perception requirements to corresponding QoS requirements for four phases of VR technology development. To shed light on how to provide short/long-range mobility for VR services, we further list four main use cases for cellular-connected wireless VR and identify their unique research challenges along with their corresponding enabling technologies and solutions in 5G systems and beyond. Last but not least, we present a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed solution and the unique QoS performance requirements of VR transmission compared to that of traditional video service in cellular networks.