Is Wi-Fi 6 Ready for Virtual Reality Mayhem? A Case Study Using One AP
and Three HMDs
Abstract
Is Wi-Fi 6 ready for virtual reality (VR) mayhem? The common use case
for untethered VR is running a video game on a powerful desktop and
streaming the generated content to a head-mounted display (HMD) over
Wi-Fi. In this work, we investigated a challenging use case using one
Wi-Fi 6 access point (AP) and three HMDs. Specifically, we evaluated
experimentally the performance of VR streaming in terms of latency
using: i) the distributed coordination function (DCF), ii) orthogonal
frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) in the downlink (DL) and the
uplink (UL) and iii) multi-user multiple input multiple output
(MU-MIMO). We showed that VR streaming to three users, up to 100 Mbps
each, works flawlessly using either DCF or DL OFDMA, with latency in the
order of 50 ms. In addition, our study unveiled the disruption of
tracking data transmissions in the uplink using UL OFDMA, which had a
negative impact on latency by delaying game rendering.