Augmented Reality (AR) has been widely hailed as a representative of ultra-high bandwidth and ultra-low latency apps that will be enabled by 5G networks. While single-user AR can perform AR tasks locally on the mobile device, multi-user AR apps, which allow multiple users to interact within the same physical space, critically rely on the cellular network to support user interactions. However, a recent study showed that multi-user AR apps can experience very high end-to-end latency when running over LTE, rendering user interaction practically infeasible. In this paper, we study whether 5G mmWave, which promises significant bandwidth and latency improvements over LTE, can support multi-user AR by conducting an in-depth measurement study of the same popular multi-user AR app over both LTE and 5G mmWave.
Our measurement and analysis show that: (1) The E2E AR latency over LTE is significantly lower compared to the values reported in the previous study. However, it still remains too high for practical user interaction. (2) 5G mmWave brings no benefits to multi-user AR apps. (3) While 5G mmWave reduces the latency of the uplink visual data transmission, there are other components of the AR app that are independent of the network technology and account for a significant fraction of the E2E latency. (4) The app drains 66% more network energy, which translates to 28% higher total energy over 5G mmWave compared to over LTE.
more »
« less
Virtual Function Placement and Traffic Steering over 5G Multi-Technology Networks
Next-generation mobile networks (5G and beyond) are expected to provide higher data rates and ultra-low latency in support of demanding applications, such as virtual and augmented reality, robots and drones, etc. To meet these stringent requirements, edge computing constitutes a central piece of the solution architecture wherein functional components of an application can be deployed over the edge network so as to reduce bandwidth demand over the core network while providing ultra-low latency communication to users. In this paper, we investigate the joint optimal placement of virtual service chains consisting of virtual application functions (components) and the steering of traffic through them, over a 5G multi-technology edge network model consisting of both Ethernet and mmWave links. This problem is NP-hard. We provide a comprehensive “microscopic" binary integer program to model the system, along with a heuristic that is one order of magnitude faster than solving the corresponding binary integer program. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the benefits of managing virtual service chains (by distributing them over the edge network) compared to a baseline “middlebox" approach in terms of overall admissible virtual capacity. We observe significant gains when deploying mmWave links that complement the Ethernet physical infrastructure. Moreover, most of the gains are attributed to only 30% of these mmWave links.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1647084
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10082120
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2018 4th IEEE Conference on Network Softwarization and Workshops (NetSoft)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 114 to 122
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
5G aims to offer not only significantly higher throughput than previous generations of cellular networks, but also promises millisecond (ms) and sub-millisecond (ultra-)low latency support at the 5G physical (PHY) layer for future applications. While prior measurement studies have confirmed that commercial 5G deployments can achieve up to several Gigabits per second (Gbps) throughput (especially with the mmWave 5G radio), are they able to deliver on the (sub) millisecond latency promise? With this question in mind, we conducted to our knowledge the first in-depth measurement study of commercial 5G mmWave PHY latency using detailed physical channel events and messages. Through carefully designed experiments and data analytics, we dissect various factors that influence 5G PHY latency of both downlink and uplink data transmissions, and explore their impacts on end-to-end delay. We find that while in the best cases, the 5G (mmWave) PHY-layer is capable of delivering ms/sub-ms latency (with a minimum of 0.09 ms for downlink and 0.76 ms for uplink), these happen rarely. A variety of factors such as channel conditions, re-transmissions, physical layer control and scheduling mechanisms, mobility, and application (edge) server placement can all contribute to increased 5G PHY latency (and thus end-to-end (E2E) delay). Our study provides insights to 5G vendors, carriers as well as application developers/content providers on how to better optimize or mitigate these factors for improved 5G latency performance.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Edge computing is an attractive architecture to efficiently provide compute resources to many applications that demand specific QoS requirements. The edge compute resources are in close geographical proximity to where the applications’ data originate from and/or are being supplied to, thus avoiding unnecessary back and forth data transmission with a data center far away. This paper describes a federated edge computing system in which compute resources at multiple edge sites are dynamically aggregated together to form distributed super-cloudlets and best respond to varying application-driven loads. In its simplest form a super-cloudlet consists of compute resources available at two edge computing sites or cloudlets that are (temporarily) interconnected by dedicated optical circuits deployed to enable low-latency and high-rate data exchanges. A super-cloudlet architecture is experimentally demonstrated over the largest public OpenROADM optical network testbed up to date consisting of commercial equipment from six suppliers. The software defined networking (SDN) PROnet Orchestrator is upgraded to both concurrently manage the resources offered by the optical network equipment, compute nodes, and associated Ethernet switches and achieve three key functionalities of the proposed super-cloudlet architecture, i.e., service placement, auto-scaling, and offloading.more » « less
-
Next-generation optical metro-access networks are expected to support end-to-end virtual network slices for critical 5G services. However, disasters affecting physical infrastructures upon which network slices are mapped can cause significant disruption in these services. Operators can deploy recovery units or trucks to restore services based on slice requirements. In this study, we investigate the problem of slice-aware service restoration in metro-access networks with specialized recovery trucks to restore services after a disaster failure. We model the problem based on classical vehicle-routing problem to find optimal routes for recovery trucks to failure sites to provide temporary backup service until the network components are repaired. Our proposed slice-aware service-restoration approach is formulated as a mixed integer linear program with the objective to minimize penalty of service disruption across different network slices.We compare our slice-aware approach with a slice-unaware approach and show that our proposed approach can achieve significant reduction in service-disruption penaltymore » « less
-
The highly anticipated 5G mmWave technology promises to enable many uplink-oriented, latency-critical applications (LCAs) such as Augmented Reality and Connected Autonomous Vehicles. Nonetheless, recent measurement studies have largely focused on its downlink performance. In thiswork,we perform a systematic study of the uplink performance of commercial 5G mmWave networks across 3 major US cities and 2 mobile operators. Our study makes three contributions. (1) It reveals that 5G mmWave uplink performance is geographically diverse, substantially higher over LTE in terms of bandwidth and latency, but often erratic and suboptimal, which can degrade LCA performance. (2) Our analysis of control messages and PHY-level KPIs shows that the root causes for the suboptimal performance are fundamental to 5G mmWave and cannot be easily fixed via simple tuning of network configurations. (3) We identify various design and deployment optimizations that 5G operators can explore to bring 5G mmWave performance to the level needed to ultimately support the LCAs.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/NETSOFT.2018.8460097
