Toward the Distributed Implementation of Immersive Augmented Reality Architectures on 5G Networks

Augmented reality (AR) has been presented lately as one of the key technology fields in which 5G networks can become a disruptive tool, raising interest from both industry and academia. The main goal of this article is to extend the current state of the art of distributed AR studies and implementations by extracting the main AR algorithms' offloading requirements individually. This extension is further achieved by depicting the data flow between these algorithms and their hardware requirements. From the obtained results, we estimate a preliminary set of network key performance indicators (KPIs) for a subset of three examples of distributed AR implementations highlighting the necessity of 5G technologies and their ecosystem to unveil the full potential of AR. Finally, based on these KPls, we propose a set of 5G configuration parameters for a successful distributed AR implementation. As most of the described algorithms are also used in virtual reality (VR) applications, our contributions can facilitate future distributed implementations of both AR and VR applications.