Minimising the computational cost of providing a mobile immersive communication environment (MICE)

Abstract

This paper investigates the minimisation of the computational cost of providing Immersive Voice Communication (IVC) for mobile clients attached to a Distributed Virtual Environment (DVE). When experiencing IVC, each listening avatar in the DVE, receives a mix of the surrounding avatars' voices, all rendered according to their respective positions in the virtual world. We propose to deliver our mobile IVC service using a type of server-based network architecture to perform voice spatialisation function and mixing for each mobile client. This model will minimise both the access bandwidth and processing power requirements of the mobile devices. We propose a model for computation reduction in servers that re-uses the result of audio spatialisation for several clients by allowing certain level of voice localisation error. Using Linear Programming (LP), we have developed two optimisation formulations to examine different scenarios of applying the computation reduction scheme, with different avatar densities and under varying rendering accuracy constraints. The insights gained from our analytical results should benefit future IVC service providers for mobile DVE.

Trading off computation for error in providing immersive voice communications for mobile gaming

“…It must be noted the term mobility in MICE refers to the mobile nature of the accessing physical clients rather than virtual world avatar mobility which is addressed in [5]. In [1], we identified two important scalability constraints for the provisioning of MICE. The first constraint is that the access bandwidth of the wireless mobile devices is scarce in comparison to the wired devices due to the limited transmission spectrum and propagation path loss.…”

“…We refer to the immersive voice communication service for mobile games as the Mobile Immersive Communication Environment (MICE). In order to minimise the computational load on the mobile client platforms in MICE, we proposed to deliver MICE over a central-server architecture [1]. Moreover, in order to improve the processing scalability of the servers supporting MICE, an optimisation model was developed, leveraging a distance-governed computation reduction scheme [1].…”

“…Recently, networked voice communication services in Distributed Virtual Environments (DVE) have attracted much research interest [1] [2] [3]. One typical example of DVE is Multi-player Online Games (MOG) such as Lineage II which had 2.1 million subscribers in January, 2005 [4].…”

The Impact of Avatar Mobility on Distributed Server Assignment for Delivering Mobile Immersive Communication Environment

“…We refer to the immersive voice communication service for mobile DVEs as Mobile Immersive Communication Environment (MICE). In [5], we identified two important scalability constraints for the provisioning of MICE. The first constraint is that the access bandwidth of the wireless mobile devices is scarce in comparison to the wired devices due to the limited transmission spectrum and propagation path loss.…”

“…The Computation Reduction Scheme and the central server architecture proposed in [5] address these scalability challenges with respect to bandwidth and processing. A distributed server architecture and two server assignment algorithms are proposed in [6] to further improve the delay performance of the central server architecture.…”