Energy consumption assessment of a Virtual Reality Remote Rendering application over 5G networks

TL;DR

This study evaluates the energy consumption of a VR remote rendering application over 5G networks, analyzing the impact on various network components and proposing monitoring solutions to optimize energy efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces two energy monitoring methods and assesses the energy footprint of a VR remote renderer in a real 5G testbed, highlighting energy-performance trade-offs.

Findings

Remote rendering impacts energy use across network components

Hardware and software energy measurement solutions are effective

Trade-offs exist between energy consumption and VR performance

Abstract

This paper investigates the energy implications of remote rendering for Virtual Reality (VR) applications within a real 5G testbed. Remote rendering enables lightweight devices to access high-performance graphical content by offloading computationally intensive tasks to Cloud-native Network Functions (CNFs) running on remote servers. However, this approach raises concerns regarding energy consumption across the various network components involved, including the remote computing node, the 5G Core, the Radio Access Network (RAN), and the User Equipment (UE). This work proposes and evaluates two complementary energy monitoring solutions, one hardware-based and one software-based, to measure energy consumption at different system levels. A VR remote renderer, deployed as CNF and leveraging the Media over QUIC (MoQ) protocol, is used as test case for assessing its energy footprint under different multimedia and network configurations. The results provide critical insights into the trade-off between energy consumption and performance of a real-world VR application running in a 5G environment.