Huawei Release VR Ready Network Technology Solution and Prototype at VR & AR World 2016

[London, United Kingdom, October 24th, 2016] VR & AR Network World 2016 took place in London last week. The event was sponsored by Huawei Network Technology Laboratory, and attracted the participation of leading experts in the Virtual Reality (VR) network industry, together with leading industry players, including Vodafone, British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Nokia, HTC, BBC, and CNN.

During the event, Huawei released the industry’s first VR ready network solution and prototype which receiving a lot of interest from attendees. Huawei also held an on-site workshop to consider joint innovation ideas in the fields of VR and AR.

VR challenges the carrier network far more than any other past visual media evolution, which includes the transition from black and white TV to color TV. VR will bring an immersive video experience to all, and will affect how we live and communicate with each other in a profound way.

Due to the variation in viewing distances, the viewing angle of a 50 inch LCD TV only covers approximately 2% of what can be seen in VR glasses, which means that an 8K resolution, the peak image quality of current TVs, is the lowest viewing configuration for VR products. VR network bandwidth demands many times the current network capacity.

In addition, the need for an immersive VR experience has created more stringent requirements on carrier networks in latency and burst tolerance. Therefore, revolutionary innovations in network technology are necessary to effectively support online VR development and the open VR Internet era.

To face the challenges introduced by VR networks, such as high bandwidth, low latency and high burst, Huawei proposed the innovative VR Ready network solution to the industry, and released ideas to solve key problems on the VR carrier network. These include non-blocking architecture, latency optimized overlay networks (Live-MDN), low latency deterministic IP networks (DIP), and next generation high throughput transport layers. Huawei also discussed potential cooperation with a number of partners based on their own network operation issues, and proposed specific solutions for various business scenarios.

The on-site VR-oriented latency network prototype attracted a lot of interest and recognition from those in attendance at the event. With numerous breakthroughs in VR network technology on the horizon, the future looks bright for VR.