Millimeter-Wave Beamforming with Continuous Coverage for Mobile Interactive Virtual Reality

TL;DR

This paper introduces coVRage, a beamforming method for millimeter-wave wireless VR that dynamically adapts to head movements, enabling high-gain coverage of the user's orientation changes for truly wireless VR experiences.

Contribution

The paper presents coVRage, a novel beamforming approach that predicts head movements and shapes beams accordingly, improving coverage and performance in wireless VR systems.

Findings

coVRage achieves continuous high-gain coverage during head rotations

The method outperforms traditional single-beam solutions in dynamic scenarios

Real-time beam adaptation enhances wireless VR experience

Abstract

Contemporary Virtual Reality (VR) setups commonly consist of a Head-Mounted Display (HMD) tethered to a content-generating server. "Cutting the wire" in such setups and going truly wireless will require a wireless network capable of delivering enormous amounts of video data at an extremely low latency. Higher frequencies, such as the millimeter-wave (mmWave) band, can support these requirements. Due to high attenuation and path loss in the mmWave frequencies, beamforming is essential. For VR setups, beamforming must adapt in real-time to the user's head rotations, but can rely on the HMD's built-in sensors providing accurate orientation estimates. In this work, we present coVRage, a beamforming solution tailored for VR HMDs. Based on past and current head orientations, the HMD predicts how the Angle of Arrival (AoA) from the access point will change in the near future, and covers this AoA trajectory with a dynamically shaped beam, synthesized using sub-arrays. We show that this solution can cover such trajectories with consistently high gain, unlike regular single-beam solutions.