Distributed VR: An Analysis of Inter-Server Traffic Through a LAN

Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) applications demand low network latency, large bandwidth, and substantial computational resources. Despite significant progress in addressing these challenges, creating Distributed VR environments remains complex. Existing VR deployments are predominantly centralized. Extending VR to a distributed setup requires solving scalability challenges of the network support needed for VR servers distributed across a network. In particular, the scale of traffic between distributed VR servers and the interaction of this VR traffic's size with various features of the VR applications are unexplored. In this study, we present and evaluate a distributed multi-server VR environment based on Mozilla's popular open-source platform, Hubs, on a local area network (LAN). By conducting traffic measurements, we evaluate how the network traffic volume to support such distributed VR setups may evolve. Our work assesses the feasibility of creating such distributed VR environments. We find that the inter-server traffic exhibits logarithmic increase with respect to the client count when the clients make human-like movements, pointing to the scalability potential of Distributed VR environments. Additionally, the study lays the foundation for future optimizations, aiming to enhance the distributed VR experience for users.