User Head Movement-Predictive XR in Immersive H2M Collaborations over Future Enterprise Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a predictive human head movement model for immersive XR in H2M collaborations, enabling real-time synchronization over enterprise networks with optimized bandwidth and reduced latency.

Contribution

It proposes a novel head movement prediction and dynamic bandwidth allocation scheme to enhance XR collaboration efficiency and quality over future enterprise networks.

Findings

Accurate head movement prediction improves XR synchronization.

The proposed scheme reduces bandwidth consumption.

End-to-end latency and jitter are maintained within requirements.

Abstract

The evolution towards future generation of mobile systems and fixed wireless networks is primarily driven by the urgency to support high-bandwidth and low-latency services across various vertical sectors. This endeavor is fueled by smartphones as well as technologies like industrial internet of things, extended reality (XR), and human-to-machine (H2M) collaborations for fostering industrial and social revolutions like Industry 4.0/5.0 and Society 5.0. To ensure an ideal immersive experience and avoid cyber-sickness for users in all the aforementioned usage scenarios, it is typically challenging to synchronize XR content from a remote machine to a human collaborator according to their head movements across a large geographic span in real-time over communication networks. Thus, we propose a novel H2M collaboration scheme where the human's head movements are predicted ahead with highly accurate models like bidirectional long short-term memory networks to orient the machine's camera in advance. We validate that XR frame size varies in accordance with the human's head movements and predict the corresponding bandwidth requirements from the machine's camera to propose a human-machine coordinated dynamic bandwidth allocation (HMC-DBA) scheme. Through extensive simulations, we show that end-to-end latency and jitter requirements of XR frames are satisfied with much lower bandwidth consumption over enterprise networks like Fiber-To-The-Room-Business. Furthermore, we show that better efficiency in network resource utilization is achieved by employing our proposed HMC-DBA over state-of-the-art schemes.