Toward Interactive Multi-User Extended Reality Using Millimeter-Wave Networking

TL;DR

This paper discusses the potential of millimeter-wave communications to enable high-quality, low-latency wireless XR experiences, highlighting current limitations and future research directions.

Contribution

It identifies the gap between current mmWave capabilities and the requirements for immersive multi-user XR, proposing key research directions to bridge this gap.

Findings

Current mmWave tech does not meet XR data rate and latency needs.

Several active research directions are identified for improving mmWave performance.

Future advancements could enable truly immersive wireless multi-user XR experiences.

Abstract

Extended Reality (XR) enables a plethora of novel interactive shared experiences. Ideally, users are allowed to roam around freely, while audiovisual content is delivered wirelessly to their Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs). Therefore, truly immersive experiences will require massive amounts of data, in the range of tens of gigabits per second, to be delivered reliably at extremely low latencies. We identify Millimeter-Wave (mmWave) communications, at frequencies between 24 and 300 GHz, as a key enabler for such experiences. In this article, we show how the mmWave state of the art does not yet achieve sufficient performance, and identify several key active research directions expected to eventually pave the way for extremely-high-quality mmWave-enabled interactive multi-user XR.