Impact of Congestion Control on Mixed Reality Applications

The rapid increase in popularity of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) has paved the way for the development of new applications that have the potential to revolutionize the current landscape of industries such as entertainment, education, and healthcare. A core component required to enable the development of these prospective applications is the ability to stream immersive videos in high quality with ultra-low latency. As a significant percentage of VR video traffic is expected to be delivered over mobile networks, it is important to evaluate if these networks are capable of supporting immersive video streaming. Although next-generation mobile networks offer the ultra-high bandwidth capabilities required to support AR/VR applications, it is currently unclear if current Congestion Control Algorithms (CCAs) are capable of effectively utilizing these networks to meet the strict throughput and latency requirements demanded by these applications. This paper aims to evaluate the performance of existing CCAs for such AR/VR applications. We study the performance of five prominent CCAs to evaluate: (i) the performance of these CCAs in 3G, 4G, and 5G environments for streaming current VR videos; and (ii) the performance of these CCAs in simulations with the expected bandwidth requirements of future AR/VR applications.