ICE-T: RC: Millimeter Wave Communications and Edge Computing for Next Generation Tetherless Mobile Virtual Reality

ICE-T：RC：下一代无线移动虚拟现实的毫米波通信和边缘计算

• 批准号: 1836909
• 负责人: Jacob Chakareski
• 金额: $ 29.99万
• 依托单位: University of Alabama Tuscaloosa
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-10-01 至 2020-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1836909&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: ICE; RC; Millimeter; Wave; Communications

Virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) technologies hold tremendous potential to advance our society, having impact on quality of life, environmental and energy conservation, and the world economy. However, two main challenges stand in the way of realizing this vision. These applications are hyper-data-intensive and require ultra-low latency, neither of which can be met by current and upcoming conventional networking methods and systems. These presently limit VR/AR applications to an offline operation, synthetic content, high-end wired equipment, and gaming/entertainment settings. This project envision a novel system at the intersection of millimeter-wave communication (mmWave) and edge computing that aims to overcome these challenges to bring us closer to the next generation tetherless VR/AR societal applications. The project will make notable contributions to the emerging area of networked VR/AR application systems and communications, leading to advances in numerous socially relevant applications, e.g., search and rescue, and disaster response. It will also facilitate fundamental research in the general application area of high-volume high-speed/low-latency data transfer in emerging settings. Beyond the direct scientific and technology impacts and their broader effects on society, educational, outreach, international collaboration, and scientific leadership activities will be pursued as an integral part of the project.Overcoming the broad performance gap between present and upcoming networked systems capabilities and anticipated requirements of next generation applications will require novel holistic approaches to capture, coding, networking, and reconstruction/navigation of VR/AR data. Towards this objective, the project will investigate a futuristic 5G heterogeneous cellular network system that integrates radio frequency (RF) and millimeter wave communication, and viewport-adaptive space-time scalable VR signal tiling, for multi-path streaming of 360-degree tetherless mobile VR applications. In this setting, the project will pursue the following synergistic investigations: (1) Navigation-aware scalable VR signal tiling to enable interactive streaming of only the data truly needed by the user during navigation; (2) Deep machine learning for user navigation prediction to assist the envisioned resource allocation methods. (3) Space-time scalable rateless code construction for effective source-channel VR signal representation to protect against prospective transmission errors. (4) Dynamic rate-distortion optimized strategies for hybrid RF-mmWave multi-path VR streaming and analysis of the foundations of the interdependencies between the VR signal tiling design and the characteristics of the two network paths. (5) Analysis of the fundamental trade-offs between edge computing and communication that arise here and pursuit of optimization methods that will leverage them to maximize the system efficiency. (6) Graph-theoretic analysis of the problem of dynamic mmWave transmitter to VR user assignment. (7) Network slicing for parallel operation with other applications. Extensive integration and experimentation will be carried out to assess, validate, and prototype the enabled research advances in practical settings.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

虚拟和增强现实 (VR/AR) 技术具有推动社会发展的巨大潜力，对生活质量、环境和能源保护以及世界经济产生影响。然而，实现这一愿景面临着两个主要挑战。这些应用程序是超数据密集型的，需要超低延迟，而当前和即将推出的传统网络方法和系统都无法满足这两个要求。这些目前将 VR/AR 应用限制为离线操作、合成内容、高端有线设备和游戏/娱乐设置。该项目设想了一种结合毫米波通信 (mmWave) 和边缘计算的新型系统，旨在克服这些挑战，让我们更接近下一代无线 VR/AR 社会应用。该项目将为网络 VR/AR 应用系统和通信的新兴领域做出显着贡献，从而推动众多社会相关应用的进步，例如搜索和救援以及灾难响应。它还将促进新兴环境中大容量高速/低延迟数据传输的一般应用领域的基础研究。除了直接的科学技术影响及其对社会的更广泛影响之外，教育、外展、国际合作和科学领导力活动也将作为该项目的一个组成部分。克服当前和即将到来的网络系统能力与预期之间的巨大性能差距下一代应用的需求将需要新颖的整体方法来捕获、编码、网络和 VR/AR 数据的重建/导航。为了实现这一目标，该项目将研究未来的 5G 异构蜂窝网络系统，该系统集成了射频 (RF) 和毫米波通信以及视口自适应时空可扩展 VR 信号平铺，用于 360 度无线移动设备的多路径流传输虚拟现实应用。在此背景下，该项目将进行以下协同研究：（1）导航感知的可扩展 VR 信号平铺，以实现仅用户在导航过程中真正需要的数据的交互式流传输； （2）用于用户导航预测的深度机器学习，以辅助设想的资源分配方法。 (3) 时空可扩展无速率代码构造，用于有效的源通道 VR 信号表示，以防止预期的传输错误。 (4)混合RF-mmWave多路径VR流的动态速率失真优化策略以及VR信号拼接设计和两个网络路径特性之间相互依赖性的基础分析。 (5) 分析此处出现的边缘计算和通信之间的基本权衡，并寻求利用它们来最大化系统效率的优化方法。 (6)动态毫米波发射机对VR用户分配问题的图论分析。 (7) 网络切片，与其他应用程序并行运行。将进行广泛的整合和实验，以评估、验证和原型化在实际环境中实现的研究进展。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

项目成果

An Energy Efficient Framework for UAV-Assisted Millimeter Wave 5G Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

无人机辅助毫米波 5G 异构蜂窝网络的节能框架

• DOI: 10.1109/tgcn.2019.2892141
• 发表时间: 2019-03
• 期刊: IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking
• 影响因子: 4.8
• 作者: Chakareski, Jacob;Naqvi, Syed;Mastronarde, Nicholas;Xu, Jie;Afghah, Fatemeh;Razi, Abolfazl
• 通讯作者: Razi, Abolfazl