Mobile VR on edge cloud

Abstract

In this paper we design and implement MEC-VR, a mobile VR system that uses a Mobile Edge Cloud (MEC) to deliver high quality VR content to today's mobile devices using 4G/LTE cellular networks. Our main contribution is in realizing a low latency control loop that streams VR scenes containing only the user's Field of View (FoV) and a latency-adaptive margin area around the FoV. This allows the clients to render locally at a high refresh rate to accommodate and compensate for the head movements before the next motion update arrives. Compared with prior approaches, our MEC-VR design requires no viewpoint prediction, supports dynamic and live VR content, and adapts to the real-world latency experienced in cellular networks between the MEC and mobile devices. We implement a prototype of MEC-VR and evaluate its performance on a MEC node connected to an LTE testbed. We demonstrate that MEC-VR can effectively stream live VR content up to 8K resolution over 4G/LTE networks and achieve more than 80% of bandwidth savings.