Performance evaluation of a streaming based protocol for 3D virtual environment exploration on mobile devices

With the recent advances of mobile computing devices with communication capabilities, virtual environment walkthrough and real-time streaming movie playback for mobile devices has opened a new class of 3D virtual environment exploration based applications such as virtual guides and malls, online gaming, training and monitoring, just to name a few. The challenge lies in how to provide a rich and detailed 3D virtual environment on thin mobile devices that are known for their lack of proper resources to process large scale 3D geometric data. In this paper, we focus on defining a new approach to remote rendering and interactive visualization of 3D virtual environments on thin mobile devices such as PDAs and cell phones. To this end, we propose efficient end-to-end streaming and rate control protocols to support the requirements of bandwidth-demanding multimedia systems. The main purpose of our proposed rate control scheme is to achieve both high end-to-end throughput and low frame rate ºuctuation in order to adapt data traffic to the frequent changes of the bandwidth and error rate, mainly due to the nature of wireless networks. We discuss the design of our proposed streaming and rate control algorithms, and report on the their performance evaluation using an extensive set of simulation experiments.