Virtual Reality Mobile Application Testing in a 5G Testbed

Abstract

This paper describes an experiment for a Virtual Reality (VR) mobile application testing in a 5G testbed. The application in its current state streams high quality multimedia content from a Cloud server creating an immersive experience for the end user. While loading the 3D environment from the Cloud server, high LTE network latency and high power consumption are observed. In this context, utilizing Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) and 5G technologies can bring many benefits to the VR application. An experiment has been designed to test the application in a 5G testbed and metrics in terms of reliability, power consumption, network resources consumption, and user experience are noted. The paper reports the experiment, testbed tools, results obtained, and upgrades performed to VR application.

Evaluation of Control over the Edge of a Configurable Mid-band 5G Base Station

“…It consists of LTE small cells, WiFi access points, a virtual Software Defined Networks (SDN)-powered Evolved Packet Core (EPC) emulator, another emulator spanning from Radio Access Network (RAN) to the LTE core, and a traffic generator. In [11], the author claimed that the increasing popularity of Virtual Reality (VR) combined with the possibilities provided by the anticipated deployment of 5G would create a high demand by end-users in terms of quality of experience, which would be challenging. To address these challenges, VR applications must exploit MEC and 5G technologies.…”