Improving the Quality of 3D Immersive Interactive Cloud Based Services Over Unreliable Network

Abstract

Applying cloud technology to 3D interactive multimedia applications is a promising way to provide flexible and cost efficient online high bandwidth immersive services to a large population of end users. One main reason cloud systems are popular among users is the fact that it relaxes the hardware requirements for high-end interactive visual applications. As most of the computational tasks are done on cloud servers, users no longer need to upgrade their hardware frequently to keep up with the ever increasing high end computing requirements of the latest applications. Moreover, cloud systems make it easier for a user to enjoy applications on different platforms, including mobile devices that are usually not powerful enough to run high-end, memory intensive services. In short, applying cloud technology to high end immersive applications has advantages in cost efficiency and flexibility both for the end users and the service providers. In previous work, we proposed a flexible framework that addresses the bandwidth utilization and latency issues by using a combination of collaborative rendering, progressive meshes, and 3D image warping techniques. In this paper, we analyze the performance of our framework for unreliable network environments where packets can be lost during network transmission. The experimental results show that compared to pure video streaming approaches, the proposed system is less sensitive to network conditions as part of the content is generated locally on the client.