On-the-Fly Edge Transcoding for Interactive VR

The recent rise of the Cloud Virtual Reality (VR) paradigm, in which VR frames are streamed from a remote server to the user's Head-Mounted Display (HMD), poses some interesting challenges from a networking perspective. VR flows are high-throughput and have strict latency requirements. In this paper, we analyze on-the-fly edge transcoding, which follows the opposite philosophy from the more common slicing approach: instead of adapting resource allocation to the content, we compress the frames to fit into the allocated bandwidth, guaranteeing limited latency. Our results show that this strategy is effective in maintaining low latency, but the picture quality is highly dependent on the computing power of the Base Station (BS).