A Practical Low Latency System for Cloud-Based VR Applications

Abstract

With the development of multimedia technologies, VR services have quickly gained popularity at an accelerating speed. To reduce the high cost of purchasing high-performance VR terminals for end users and to enhance the user experience, recently, the concept of cloud-based VR was proposed which brings the cloud computing technologies to VR services. On-cloud GPU clusters and multi-core servers are expected to be used for simplifying VR terminals at the users’ side. This idea, however, arises several challenges in deploying such cloud-based VR system for practical applications, among which the cloud-to-end latency is mainly concerned. In this paper, we designed a practical solution for bearing cloud-based VR applications. We aim at reducing the cloud-to-end latency to improve the experience of end users. In our system, a frame splitting technique was proposed to fulfill the goal. Specially designed algorithms including reference frame determination and rate control strategies were also included to limit the computational complexity and improve the coding efficiency while obtaining promising user experience. Experimental results showed that the proposed system can significantly reduce the cloud-to-end latency.

This research was supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61801364) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. JB180105).