Application-level performance of cross-layer scheduling for social VR in 5G.

Social VR aims at enabling people located at different places to communicate and interact with each other in a natural way. It poses extremely strong throughput and latency requirements on the underlying communication networks. This paper investigates the potential of using cross-layer design approaches for radio access scheduling in order to realize these challenging requirements in (beyond) 5G networks. In particular, we provide an in-depth simulation study of the performance/capacity gains that can be achieved by exploiting the end-to-end latency budget and/or video frame type as crosslayer information in the scheduling decisions, and show how the benefits depend on the actual social VR scenario. This study further reveals the importance of using application-level metrics such as PSNR or SSIM rather than traditional network-level metrics like the packet drop rate in the performance assessment.