Can Millimeter-Wave Support Interactive Extended Reality Under Rapid Rotational Motion?
Jakob Struye, Hany Assasa, Barend Van Liempd, Arnout Diels, Jeroen Famaey
TL;DR
The paper investigates the feasibility of using mmWave links for mobile interactive XR under rapid rotational motion by evaluating throughput and latency of IEEE 802.11ad/ay hardware across various PHY/MAC configurations. Through static and mobility experiments at a 3 m link distance, the authors analyze how MCS, beacon interval, and beam-tracking placement affect performance, using per-packet timestamps to capture latency and packet loss. Key findings show that static throughput can reach about 1.85–2.12 Gbps with sub-2 ms latency under favorable configurations, but mobility—especially rapid or extreme rotations—significantly degrades reliability, increasing losses and latency. The work concludes that while mmWave XR is feasible, achieving uninterrupted high-quality experiences under rapid motion requires faster or proactive beam tracking and potentially multi-AP or distributed antenna system coverage, along with robust streaming protocols.
Abstract
Using Millimeter-Wave (mmWave) wireless communications is often named as the prime enabler for mobile interactive Extended Reality (XR), as it offers multi-gigabit data rates at millisecond-range latency. To achieve this, mmWave nodes must focus their energy towards each other, which is especially challenging in XR scenarios, where the transceiver on the user's XR device may rotate rapidly. To evaluate the feasibility of mmWave XR, we present the first throughput and latency evaluation of state-of-the-art mmWave hardware under rapid rotational motion, for different PHY and MAC-layer parameter configurations. We show that this parameter configuration has a significant impact on performance, and that specialized beamforming approaches for rapid rotational motion may be necessary to enable uninterrupted, high-quality mobile interactive XR experiences.