3D Visual Communications

1.4 Challenges and Opportunities

As 3D visual communication has become one of the main focus research areas for the coming decade, we emphasize some potential research directions in this chapter. Streaming 3D video over 4G wireless networks has become a feasible and practicable application. 4G wireless network standards include mechanisms to establish connections with different scheduling types and priorities, which support, for example, traffic with guaranteed maximum and minimum traffic rates. Also, the standards include different mechanisms that allow the uplink scheduler at the base station to learn the status of the buffers at the mobiles. Since the resource allocation mechanism is not yet specified in 4G wireless communication standard, it is an important topic to jointly consider the design of schedulers and resource allocation mechanisms with the QoS-related mechanisms in the standard to meet the final users' QoE requirement. The combination of the flexibility offered by 4G physical layer technologies, such as OFDM and AMC, and 4G features at higher layers, such as QoS support for heterogeneous services and all-IP, results in a framework that is suitable for delivery of 3D video services which require high bit rates, low latencies, and the feasibility to deploy adaptive application layer adjustment, such as unequal error protection, that can tailor the error control and transmission parameters to the very different requirements exhibited by the different components of 3D ...