A Novel Serious Game Engineering Based Interactive Visualization and Evaluation Platform for Cellular Technologies

In today's world, mobile communication has become a ubiquitously used technology, currently on the verge of its fifth generation (5G). 5G anticipates higher traffic volume and connected device density than present. It further envisions variety of service types and use cases arising from them. Various 5G concepts are being developed in order to satiate the aforementioned challenges. One of the key tasks for 5G consortium however, is to present the developed technology and concepts to wider audience (academia, industry) and even convince decision makers from non-information and communications technology (ICT) industries. Thus, it is desired to have easy to understand illustrations of envisioned 5G use cases and proposed technical solutions, targeting the non-experts. The contemporary simulation framework has limited or no provision to dynamically visualize and interact with the simulation scenario, rendering it difficult to be used for marketing as well as academic purposes. In this paper, we propose a serious game engineering based 3D visualization and evaluation framework, which allows dynamic and interactive visualization of simulated scenario. The proposed framework is simulator agnostic which enables viewer to immerse oneself into the simulated scene, visualize key performance indicators (KPI) in almost real time and even interact with simulator by changing key simulation parameters. These features equip the proposed interactive visualization/evaluation platform (IVEP) to demonstrate the 5G use cases and developed concepts better, paving way for easier understanding and evaluation of the concepts even by non-experts.