Edge-Assisted Real-Time Dynamic 3D Point Cloud Rendering for Multi-Party Mobile Virtual Reality

Multi-party Mobile Virtual Reality (MMVR) enables multiple mobile users to share virtual scenes for an immersive multimedia experience in scenarios such as gaming, social interaction, and industrial mission collaboration. Dynamic 3D Point Cloud (DPCL) is an emerging representation form of MMVR that can be consumed as a free-viewpoint video with 6 degrees of freedom. With limited on-device resources, it is a challenge to achieve a satisfying frame rate for DPCL rendering, which makes edge-assisted rendering a practical solution. However, repeated loading of DPCL scenes with a substantial amount of metadata introduces a significant redundancy overhead that cannot be overlooked when enabling multiple edge servers to support the rendering requirements of user groups. In this paper, we design PoClVR, an edge-assisted DPCL rendering system for MMVR applications, which introduces an object-level splitting mode to alleviate performance bottlenecks caused by redundant loading. In addition, PoClVR dynamically selects the splitting mode and scheduling decisions to adapt to varying task requirements and available computational resources, thereby improving overall system efficiency. To evaluate the performance of PoClVR, we implement and deploy a realistic prototype system and also conduct large-scale trace-driven simulations. The experimental results show that PoClVR can reduce resource usage by up to approximately 49.3% under different task requirements and resource conditions, while decreasing bottleneck performance degradation by up to 77.3%.