360° VR Cloud Gaming Over 5G&B Softwarized Networks

Virtual reality (VR) cloud gaming faces significant challenges in terms of latency and bandwidth consumption, particularly in softwarized 5 G and beyond (5G&B) networks. Ensuring an immersive experience on low-end devices, such as smartphones and cardboard-like headsets, requires innovative solutions to mitigate delay effects and optimize resource usage. This research focuses on enhancing VR cloud gaming performance by leveraging Digital Twins (DTs) and hierarchical compression techniques. The proposed system adopts a client-server architecture, where computationally intensive tasks are offloaded to the server, minimizing processing requirements on the client side. A key contribution is a novel delay estimation and management framework that employs DTs to synchronize video streaming and user input, reducing the impact of latency. Additionally, viewport-based hierarchical compression is applied to optimize bandwidth consumption while maintaining high perceived quality. The proposed architecture is evaluated through extensive experiments analyzing the effects of input delay, delay fluctuations, and compression methods on user performance and perceived quality. Results demonstrate that the system effectively mitigates adverse network conditions, ensuring a seamless and immersive VR gaming experience even in suboptimal environments.