Environment-driven mmWave Beamforming for Multi-user Immersive Applications.

This position paper explores the challenges and opportunities for high-quality immersive volumetric video streaming for multiple users over millimeter-wave (mmWave) WLANs. While most of the previous work has focused on single-user streaming, there is a growing need for multi-user immersive applications such as virtual collaboration, classroom education, teleconferencing, etc. While mmWave wireless links can provide multi-gigabit per second data rates, they suffer from blockages and high beamforming overhead. This paper investigates an environment-driven approach to address the challenges. It presents a comprehensive research agenda that includes developing a collaborative 3D scene reconstruction process, material identification, ray tracing, blockage mitigation, and cross-layer multi-user video rate adaptation. Our preliminary results show the feasibility and identify the limitations of existing solutions. Finally, we discuss the open challenges of implementing a practical system based on the proposed research agenda.