Evaluating Multimedia Protocols on 5G Edge for Mobile Augmented Reality

Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) mixes physical environments with user-interactive virtual annotations. Immersive MAR experiences are supported by computation-intensive tasks, which are typically offloaded to cloud or edge servers. Such offloading introduces additional network traffic and influences the motion-to-photon latency (a determinant of user-perceived quality of experience). Therefore, proper multimedia protocols are crucial to minimise transmission latency and ensure sufficient throughput to support MAR performance. Relatedly, 5G is a potential MAR supporting technology and is widely believed to be faster and more efficient than its predecessors. However, the suitability and performance of existing multimedia protocols for MAR in the 5G edge context have not been explored. In this work, we present a detailed evaluation of several popular multimedia protocols (HLS, MPEG-DASH, RTP, RTMP, RTMFP, and RTSP) and transport protocols (QUIC, UDP, and TCP) with a MAR system on a real-world 5G edge testbed. The evaluation results indicate that RTMP has the lowest median client-to-server packet latency on 5G and LTE for all image resolutions. In terms of individual image resolutions, from 144p to 480p over 5G and LTE, RTMP has the lowest median packet latency of 14.03 +/- 1.05 ms. Whereas for jitter, HLS has the smallest median jitter across all image resolutions over LTE and 5G with medians of 2.62 ms and 1.41 ms, respectively. Our experimental results indicate that RTMP and HLS are the most suitable protocols for MAR.