Abstract
The dawn of the 5G commercialization era brings the proliferation of advanced capabilities within the triptych of radio access network, end user devices, and edge cloud computing which hopefully propel the introduction of novel, complex multimodal services such as those that enlarge the physical world around us like mobile augmented reality. Managing such advanced services in a granular manner through the emerging architectures of microservices within a network functions virtualization (NFV) framework allows for several benefits but also raises some challenges. The aim of this chapter is to shed light into the architectural aspects of the above-envisioned virtualized mobile network ecosystem. More specifically, and as an example of advanced services, the authors discuss how augmented reality applications can be decomposed into several service components that can be located either at the end-user terminal or at the edge cloud.
Top(Mobile) Augmented Reality (Ar)
Emerging advanced services in mobile communication networks including AR can be categorized into several types based on their running platforms. Those that can be deemed as hardware-specific services usually require a specially designed device (e.g., Pokémon Plus, Bluetooth wearable device) and as a result suffer from a rather excessive cost with insufficient flexibility (Qiao et al., 2019; Frank, 2016). Although some app-based services like Pokémon Go and IKEA Place have been successful, downloading and installing apps on platforms like smartphones and iPads are still inconvenient for users and lack of cross-platform ability (Qiao et al. 2019). As pointed out by Li et al. (2020), rendering high quality images with AR techniques consumes much storage space and computational resources especially in a 3-dimensional (3D) scenario. As a result, web-based applications have been proposed and are regarded as having a considerable potential to solve these problems. It is worth point out that these applications can be decomposed into a set of atomic functions and apply a web-scale deployment to achieve better efficiency (Cziva and Pezaros, 2017; Akhtar et al., 2018). Through 5G or Beyond 5G (B5G) networks, the transmission latency is also envisioned to be significantly reduced which leads to further accelerating the use of such an application with low latency response to the requesting user (Qiao et al., 2019; Gero et al., 2017). According to Li et al. (2020), Liu et al. (2018) and Guo et al. (2020), resource allocation and request assignment in a network can be translated into different types of optimization problems. Supported by techniques like “branch and bound”, it is possible to find optimal solutions for such NP-hard problem suffer from the so-called curse of dimensionality meaning that can be used for low to medium network instances; for large network instances heuristic techniques that can provide non optimal but competitive performance will have to be deployed. Likewise, machine learning techniques will play a significant role as discussed in the following sections. Other research efforts have focused on a certain stage (e.g., caching, data detection) within the AR chain which can further propel to elevate the performance of Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) apps (Wu et al., 2014; Liu et al., 2019). However, there are still lots of challenges in this area such as the better addressing of user mobility, the standardization of mobile web browsers and the design of low-cost architectures (Qiao et al., 2019; Li et al., 2020; Cziva and Pezaros, 2017).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Quality of Service (QoS): A measurement of the overall performance of a system or a service. In networking, it also includes traffic prioritization and resource reservation control mechanisms.
Service Function Chaining (SFC): An ordered set of abstract service functions (SFs) and ordering constraints that must be applied to packets, frames, and/or flows selected as a result of classification.
Virtual Network Functions (VNF): Network functions are virtualized into building blocks (chain together) to provide services and consist of several Virtual Machines or other containers.
Microservices Architecture (MSA): It is an SOA structure that decouples, arranges, and manages service functions in a fine-grained manner with lightweight protocols.
Mobile Edge Cloud (MEC): It constructs a distributed service environment and enables cloud computing capabilities at the edge of a network, which is closer to the user.
Monolithic Architecture (MA): A software structural design that builds the system as a single unit.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA): An independent and self-contained software structural design where application components provide services to other ones through pre-defined communication protocols.
Augmented Reality (AR): It integrates virtual objects into 3D real world based on computer perceptual information.