Performance evaluation of a streaming based protocol for 3D virtual environment exploration on mobile devices

Abstract

With the recent advances of mobile computing devices with communication capabilities, virtual environment walkthrough and real-time streaming movie playback for mobile devices has opened a new class of 3D virtual environment explorationbased applications such as virtual guides and malls, online gaming, training and monitoring, just to name a few. The challenge lies in how to provide a rich and detailed 3D virtual environment on thin mobile devices that are known for their lack of proper resources to process large scale 3D geometric data. In this paper, we focus on defining a new approach to remote rendering and interactive visualization of 3D virtual environments on thin mobile devices such as PDAs and cell phones. To this end, we propose efficient end-to-end streaming and rate control protocols to support the requirements of bandwidth-demanding multimedia systems. The main purpose of our proposed rate control scheme is to achieve both high end-to-end throughput and low frame rate fluctuation in order to adapt data traffic to the frequent changes of the bandwidth and error rate, mainly due to the nature of wireless networks. We discuss the design of our proposed streaming and rate control algorithms, and report on the their performance evaluation using an extensive set of simulation experiments.

Web-based virtual walkthrough of panoramas

“…Moreover, there is no need to download the entire environment because it is remotely rendered and streamed while the user moves through different areas. The reader can also refer to [3][4][5]9] for detailed information about other solutions for remote walkthrough.…”

The State of the Art in Mobile Graphics Research

“…Pazzi pres ent a streaming protocol for 3D virtualenviron ment exploration on mobile devices; they address network transmission problems such as rate and congestion control. 23 Siddhartha Chattopadhyay and his colleagues describe poweraware compres sion and transmission of motion capture data for mobile devices. 24 Several issues must be solved for remote ren dering, such as connectivity problems, latency for transmitting user input, and rendered images.…”

A Peer-to-Peer Approach for Remote Rendering and Image Streaming in Walkthrough Applications

“…In [3], [4], we have proposed a client/server solution, which consists of a remote 3D rendering server that sends images to mobile client devices. Image-based rendering [1], more specifically, panoramic rendering [12], is then performed at the client side in order to provide user interaction within the virtual environment.…”

“…Therefore we need to come up with a scalable distribution algorithm in order to couple with the variety of user's interests. We use the base protocol and packet headers as well as rate control, buffering and scheduling mechanisms specified in [3], [4]. This paper is organized as follows.…”