No Arabic abstract
Wireless Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) will contribute to people increasingly working and socializing remotely. However, the VR/AR experience is very susceptible to various delays and timing discrepancies, which can lead to motion sickness and discomfort. This paper models and exploits the existence of multiple paths and redundancy to improve the timing performance of wireless VR communications. We consider Multiple Description Coding (MDC), a scheme where the video stream is encoded in Q streams (Q = 2 in this paper) known as descriptors and delivered independently over multiple paths. We also consider an alternating scheme, that simply switches between the paths. We analyze the full distribution of two relevant metrics: the packet delay and the Peak Age of Information (PAoI), which measures the freshness of the information at the receiver. The results show interesting trade-offs between picture quality, frame rate, and latency: full duplication results in fewer lost frames, but a higher latency than schemes with less redundancy. Even the simple alternating scheme can outperform duplication in terms of PAoI, but MDC can exploit the independent decodability of the descriptors to deliver a basic version of the frames faster, while still getting the full-quality frames with a slightly higher delay.
In addition to traditional concerns such as throughput and latency, freshness is becoming increasingly important. To stay fresh, applications stream status updates among their components, which can congest the network if the update frequency is too high. Tuning to the right frequency is not trivial, especially in the presence of other flows, when network sharing becomes much more involved. Also, sophisticated tuning logic inevitably complicates the design of the endhost devices. In this paper, we take an alternative approach. Instead of tuning the update frequency at the end-host, we let the endhost send out updates at its own pace and control the freshness within the network. This In-network Freshness Control (IFC) scheme allows the network operator to improve freshness while providing a fine-grained trade-off with throughput. IFC leverages in-network compute resources to filter out obsolete information during transmission of status updates, while queueing other drop-averse traffic separately to provide high throughput. We provide an analytic study of IFC and then implement IFC as Linux kernel modules. Our experiments show that IFC outperforms existing queueing disciplines by improving both throughput (by up to 40%) and freshness (by up to 50%). IFC can easily be combined with existing methods, e.g., BBR and DCTCP, and is effective even in partial deployments.
Virtual reality (VR) over wireless is emerging as an important use case of 5G networks. Immersive VR experience requires the delivery of huge data at ultra-low latency, thus demanding ultra-high transmission rate. This challenge can be largely addressed by the recent network architecture known as mobile edge computing (MEC), which enables caching and computing capabilities at the edge of wireless networks. This paper presents a novel MEC-based mobile VR delivery framework that is able to cache parts of the field of views (FOVs) in advance and run certain post-processing procedures at the mobile VR device. To optimize resource allocation at the mobile VR device, we formulate a joint caching and computing decision problem to minimize the average required transmission rate while meeting a given latency constraint. When FOVs are homogeneous, we obtain a closed-form expression for the optimal joint policy which reveals interesting communications-caching-computing tradeoffs. When FOVs are heterogeneous, we obtain a local optima of the problem by transforming it into a linearly constrained indefinite quadratic problem then applying concave convex procedure. Numerical results demonstrate great promises of the proposed mobile VR delivery framework in saving communication bandwidth while meeting low latency requirement.
Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC) is an important challenge for the next generation wireless networks, which poses very strict requirements to the delay and packet loss ratio. Satisfaction is hardly possible without introducing additional functionality to the existing communication technologies. In the paper, we propose and study an approach to enable URLLC in Wi-Fi networks by exploiting an additional radio similar to that of IEEE 802.11ba. With extensive simulation, we show that our approach allows decreasing the delay by orders of magnitude, while the throughput of non-URLLC devices is reduced insignificantly.
Age of Information (AoI) has become an important concept in communications, as it allows system designers to measure the freshness of the information available to remote monitoring or control processes. However, its definition tacitly assumes that new information is used at any time, which is not always the case: the instants at which information is collected and used are dependent on a certain query process. We propose a model that accounts for the discrete time nature of many monitoring processes, considering a pull-based communication model in which the freshness of information is only important when the receiver generates a query: if the monitoring process is not using the value, the age of the last update is irrelevant. We then define the Age of Information at Query (QAoI), a more general metric that fits the pull-based scenario, and show how its optimization can lead to very different choices from traditional push-based AoI optimization when using a Packet Erasure Channel (PEC) and with limited link availability. Our results show that QAoI-aware optimization can significantly reduce the average and worst-case perceived age for both periodic and stochastic queries.
Many systems require frequent and regular updates of a certain information. These updates have to be transferred regularly from the source to the destination. We consider scenarios in which an old packet becomes completely obsolete, in the presence of a new packet. In this context, if a new packet arrives at the source while it is transferring a packet, one needs to decide the packet to be dropped. New packet has recent information, but might require more time to transfer. Thus it is not clear as to which packet to be dis- carded, and this is the main focus of the paper. Recently introduced performance metrics, called average age of information (AAoI) and peak age of information (PAoI) of the information available at the destination, are the relevant performance measures. These type of systems do not require storage buffers, of size more than one, at the source queue. We consider single source / multiple sources regularly updating information to a single destination possibly over wireless channels to derive optimal drop policies that optimize the AAoI. We showed that the state independent (static) policies like dropping always the old packets or dropping always the new packets is optimal in many scenarios, among an appropriate set of stationary Markov policies. We consider relevant games when multiple sources compete. In many scenarios, the non-cooperative solution almost minimizes the social objective, the sum of AAoIs of all the sources.