Can Millimeter-Wave Support Interactive Extended Reality Under Rapid Rotational Motion?

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the performance of millimeter-wave wireless communication for mobile interactive XR under rapid rotational motion, highlighting the importance of beamforming strategies for maintaining high-quality experiences.

Contribution

It provides the first throughput and latency analysis of mmWave hardware under rapid rotation, emphasizing the need for specialized beamforming in XR scenarios.

Findings

Performance varies significantly with PHY and MAC parameters.

Rapid rotation challenges standard beamforming approaches.

Specialized beamforming may be required for seamless XR experiences.

Abstract

Using Millimeter-Wave (mmWave) wireless communications is often named as the prime enabler for mobile interactive Extended Reality (XR), as it offers multi-gigabit data rates at millisecond-range latency. To achieve this, mmWave nodes must focus their energy towards each other, which is especially challenging in XR scenarios, where the transceiver on the user's XR device may rotate rapidly. To evaluate the feasibility of mmWave XR, we present the first throughput and latency evaluation of state-of-the-art mmWave hardware under rapid rotational motion, for different PHY and MAC-layer parameter configurations. We show that this parameter configuration has a significant impact on performance, and that specialized beamforming approaches for rapid rotational motion may be necessary to enable uninterrupted, high-quality mobile interactive XR experiences.