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Performance Evaluation of Transport Protocols and Roadmap to a High-Performance Transport Design for Immersive Applications

Inayat Ali, Seungwoo Hong, Pyung-koo Park, Tae Yeon Kim

TL;DR

This paper investigates holographic-type communication (HTC) within immersive technologies and evaluates traditional transport protocols—UDP, TCP, and QUIC—under HTC-like workloads using ns-3 simulations. It demonstrates that while UDP achieves the highest raw throughput, its lack of reliability makes it unsuitable for HTC, whereas QUIC variants with multi-streaming and per-stream buffers offer tangible gains over TCP by reducing head-of-line blocking and stabilizing RTTs in both LAN and WAN scenarios. A cross-layer, application-aware roadmap is proposed to guide the design of a new high-performance transport protocol, incorporating multicast support, segment-level reliability, multi-streaming, and connection migration to meet HTC's stringent requirements. The findings aim to inform future work toward a transport design that can deliver consistent, low-latency, and reliable immersive experiences at scale.

Abstract

Immersive technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and holograms will change users' digital experience. These immersive technologies have a multitude of applications, including telesurgeries, teleconferencing, Internet shopping, computer games, etc. Holographic-type communication (HTC) is a type of augmented reality media that provides an immersive experience to Internet users. However, HTC has different characteristics and network requirements, and the existing network architecture and transport protocols may not be able to cope with the stringent network requirements of HTC. Therefore, in this paper, we provide an in-depth and critical study of the transport protocols for HTC. We also discuss the characteristics and the network requirements for HTC. Based on the performance evaluation of the existing transport protocols, we propose a roadmap to design new high-performance transport protocols for immersive applications.

Performance Evaluation of Transport Protocols and Roadmap to a High-Performance Transport Design for Immersive Applications

TL;DR

This paper investigates holographic-type communication (HTC) within immersive technologies and evaluates traditional transport protocols—UDP, TCP, and QUIC—under HTC-like workloads using ns-3 simulations. It demonstrates that while UDP achieves the highest raw throughput, its lack of reliability makes it unsuitable for HTC, whereas QUIC variants with multi-streaming and per-stream buffers offer tangible gains over TCP by reducing head-of-line blocking and stabilizing RTTs in both LAN and WAN scenarios. A cross-layer, application-aware roadmap is proposed to guide the design of a new high-performance transport protocol, incorporating multicast support, segment-level reliability, multi-streaming, and connection migration to meet HTC's stringent requirements. The findings aim to inform future work toward a transport design that can deliver consistent, low-latency, and reliable immersive experiences at scale.

Abstract

Immersive technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and holograms will change users' digital experience. These immersive technologies have a multitude of applications, including telesurgeries, teleconferencing, Internet shopping, computer games, etc. Holographic-type communication (HTC) is a type of augmented reality media that provides an immersive experience to Internet users. However, HTC has different characteristics and network requirements, and the existing network architecture and transport protocols may not be able to cope with the stringent network requirements of HTC. Therefore, in this paper, we provide an in-depth and critical study of the transport protocols for HTC. We also discuss the characteristics and the network requirements for HTC. Based on the performance evaluation of the existing transport protocols, we propose a roadmap to design new high-performance transport protocols for immersive applications.
Paper Structure (15 sections, 15 figures)

This paper contains 15 sections, 15 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Challenges and Network Requirements of Immersive Applications
  3. High Bandwidth
  4. Ultra-Low Latency
  5. Application Requirements
  6. Transport Protocols Overview
  7. Performance Evaluation of Transport Protocols for Immersive Applications
  8. Simulation Environment
  9. Results and Discussion
  10. Roadmap for Designing Novel Transport Protocols for Immersive Applications
  11. Application-specific Requirements
  12. Multicast support
  13. Segment level reliability
  14. Multi-streaming and connection migration
  15. Conclusion and Future Work

Figures (15)

  • Figure 1: QUIC and TCP protocols stack
  • Figure 2: Network scenario for performance evaluation
  • Figure 3: Retrieval time of HTC object by different transport protocols and congestion variants
  • Figure 4: Average throughput of transport protocols
  • Figure 5: Average end-to-end delay in transport protocols
  • ...and 10 more figures