Can cloud-based VR streaming handle Wi-Fi OBSS contention?

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Wi-Fi OBSS contention affects VR streaming performance and demonstrates that a network-aware adaptive bitrate algorithm can mitigate these effects, enabling more robust VR experiences in crowded Wi-Fi environments.

Contribution

The study provides an experimental analysis of OBSS contention impacts on VR streaming and introduces an effective adaptive bitrate algorithm for OBSS scenarios.

Findings

Increased OBSSs worsen VR streaming performance.

Secondary-sided 40 MHz activity degrades performance more.

NeSt-VR algorithm mitigates OBSS-induced degradation.

Abstract

This paper experimentally analyzes the negative impact of contention caused by neighboring Wi-Fi networks operating on overlapping channels on Virtual Reality (VR) streaming over Wi-Fi, focusing on scenarios of partial and full channel overlap within an 80 MHz channel. Our results show that (i) increasing the number of 80 MHz Overlapping Basic Service Sets (OBSSs) intensifies contention and degrades VR streaming performance; (ii) OBSS activity on the secondary-sided 40 MHz portion degrades performance more than activity on the primary-sided 40 MHz portion; (iii) for the same aggregate load, full channel overlap with two 40 MHz OBSS contenders is less detrimental than partial overlap with a single high-load 40 MHz contender, but more disruptive than full overlap with two 80 MHz contenders; and (iv) full channel overlap with two 40 MHz OBSS contenders has a smaller impact on VR streaming under symmetric traffic loads than under asymmetric loads. Moreover, our results demonstrate that our previously proposed Network-aware Step-wise adaptive bitrate algorithm for VR streaming (NeSt-VR) effectively mitigates performance degradation in OBSS environments, enabling VR streaming under heavier OBSS traffic conditions.