Rendering multi-party mobile augmented reality from edge

Abstract

Mobile augmented reality (MAR) augments a real-world environment (probably surrounding or close to the mobile user) by computer-generated perceptual information. Utilizing the emerging edge computing paradigm in MAR systems can reduce the power consumption and computation load for the mobile devices and improve responsiveness of the MAR service. Different from existing studies that mainly explored how to better enable the MAR services utilizing edge computing resources, our focus is to optimize the video generation stage of the edge-based MAR services-efficiently using the available edge computing resources to render and encode the augmented reality as video streams to the mobile clients. Specifically, for multi-party AR applications, we identify the advantages and disadvantages of two encoding schemes, namely colocated encoding and spilt encoding, and examine the trade-off between performance and scalability when the rendering and encoding tasks are colocated or split. Towards optimally placing AR video rendering and encoding in the edge, we formulate and solve the rendering and encoding task assignment problem for multi-party edge-based MAR services to maximize the QoS for the users and the edge computing efficiency. The proposed task assignment scheme is proved to be superior through extensive trace-driven simulations and experiments on our prototype system.