Is Wi-Fi 6 Ready for Virtual Reality Mayhem? A Case Study Using One AP and Three HMDs

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.