FleXR: A System Enabling Flexibly Distributed Extended Reality

TL;DR

FleXR is a distributed stream processing system designed to enable flexible, low-latency XR functionalities across various deployment environments, improving performance and streamlining development.

Contribution

It introduces a novel system that allows flexible distribution of XR workloads, overcoming limitations of prior fixed offloading approaches.

Findings

Up to 50% reduction in end-to-end latency

3.9x increase in pipeline throughput

Effective across multiple XR use cases and deployment scenarios

Abstract

Extended reality (XR) applications require computationally demanding functionalities with low end-to-end latency and high throughput. To enable XR on commodity devices, a number of distributed systems solutions enable offloading of XR workloads on remote servers. However, they make a priori decisions regarding the offloaded functionalities based on assumptions about operating factors, and their benefits are restricted to specific deployment contexts. To realize the benefits of offloading in various distributed environments, we present a distributed stream processing system, FleXR, which is specialized for real-time and interactive workloads and enables flexible distributions of XR functionalities. In building FleXR, we identified and resolved several issues of presenting XR functionalities as distributed pipelines. FleXR provides a framework for flexible distribution of XR pipelines while streamlining development and deployment phases. We evaluate FleXR with three XR use cases in four different distribution scenarios. In the results, the best-case distribution scenario shows up to 50% less end-to-end latency and 3.9x pipeline throughput compared to alternatives.