5G Edge Computing Enhanced Mobile Augmented Reality

Physical world enhancements through virtually drawn annotations on mobile devices are a core component of mobile augmented reality (MAR) experiences. However, resource intensive computer vision tasks typically limit the full deployment of MAR pipelines on-device due to a lack of required computation resources. As an alternative, a distributed scheme between client devices and edge servers enables offloading computation intensive tasks to powerful machines. This introduces challenges, such as maintaining low communication latency and high bandwidth channels between client and edge server. Current LTE and WiFi infrastructure do not fulfil such requirements. 5G networks are an ideal candidate to provide seamless MAR experiences. This research investigates the enhancement of MAR with both 5G and edge computing and aims to address two particular challenges: 1) the creation of a new 5G-based edge computing infrastructure to support reliable MAR, and 2) investigating which particular transport protocols allow for optimised quality of experience (QoE) for MAR applications within 5G infrastructure.