Opportunities and Challenges for Virtual Reality Streaming over Millimeter-Wave: An Experimental Analysis

TL;DR

This paper experimentally evaluates the potential of millimeter-wave wireless links for high-quality VR streaming, highlighting challenges like blockage, line-of-sight issues, and the need for careful TCP tuning.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental analysis of mmWave capabilities for VR streaming, using a novel testbed to assess real-world challenges.

Findings

Motion can cause brief transmission interruptions

Blockage and line-of-sight issues degrade throughput unpredictably

TCP streaming requires careful tuning for mmWave links

Abstract

Achieving extremely high-quality and truly immersive interactive Virtual Reality (VR) is expected to require a wireless link to the cloud, providing multi-gigabit throughput and extremely low latency. A prime candidate for fulfilling these requirements is millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications, operating in the 30 to 300 GHz bands, rather than the traditional sub-6 GHz. Evaluations with first-generation mmWave Wi-Fi hardware, based on the IEEE 802.11ad standard, have so far largely remained limited to lower-layer metrics. In this work, we present the first experimental analysis of the capabilities of mmWave for streaming VR content, using a novel testbed capable of repeatably creating blockage through mobility. Using this testbed, we show that (a) motion may briefly interrupt transmission, (b) a broken line of sight may degrade throughput unpredictably, and (c) TCP-based streaming frameworks need careful tuning to behave well over mmWave.