Scheduling and buffering mechanisms for remote rendering streaming in virtual walkthrough class of applications

Abstract

With the recent advances of wireless networking and mobile devices technologies, exploration of remote 3D virtual environments has received a great deal of attention nowadays where many applications can be envisioned, such as virtual guides malls, online gaming, just to name a few. The primary objective of this paper is to present the specification of a buffering mechanism and a scheduling solution for on-time image delivery for a class of applications that is based upon a remote virtual environment exploration. Similar to a video buffering, our approach involves buffering the images closest to the user's position within the virtual environment, thereby, providing the client device with the necessary imagery data for rendering future user's viewpoints, removing network jitter, and providing smooth virtual interactionIn this paper, in order to overcome the limitations of current mobile device graphics performance, we propose to use a remote rendering approach that streams the necessary images to a client device as the user explores the virtual environment, leaving only the display and a number of minor image-based rendering tasks to the local, less powerful mobile hardware. Using ns-2, we present and extensive set of simulation experiments to evaluate the performance of our scheme. Our results indicate clearly that our solution is able to guarantee on-time delivery for approximately 40 sessions with a 10 Mbps link