3D Visual Communications

1.3 3D Visual Communications

Living in an era of widespread mobility and networking, where almost all consumer electronic devices are endpoints of the wireless/wired networks, the deployment of 3D visual representation will significantly challenge the network bandwidth as well as the computational capability of terminal points. In other words, the data volume received in an endpoint required to generate 3D views will be many times greater than that in a single view of a 2D system, and hence the new view generation process sets a higher requirement for the endpoint's computational capability. The emerging 4G networks can significantly improve the bandwidth as well as include many new features designed specifically for high-volume data communications, which fit well into the timing of 3D visual communications. The two main 4G standards are 3GPP LTE (long-term evolution) [1] and IEEE 802.16m WiMAX (sometimes called WiMAX 2) [2]. Both standards provide features in the physical layer achieving high data rates and low latency based on orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) technology with adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) and multiple transmit/receive antenna (MIMO) support. In the upper communication layers, 4G networks support all-IP architectures and allow the uplink scheduler at the base station to learn the buffer status for the associated mobile devices by offering several quality of service (QoS) mechanisms to establish connections with different scheduling types ...