Do We Need Sophisticated System Design for Edge-assisted Augmented Reality?

We revisit the performance of a canonical system design for edge-assisted AR that simply combines off-the-shelf H.264 video encoding with a standard object tracking technique. Our experimental analysis shows that the simple canonical design for edge-assisted object detection can achieve within 3.07%/1.51% of the accuracy of ideal offloading (which assumes infinite network bandwidth and the total network transmission time of a single RTT) under LTE/5G mmWave networks. Our findings suggest that recent trend towards sophisticated system architecture design for edge-assisted AR appears unnecessary. We provide insights for why video compression plus on-device object tracking is so effective in edge-assisted object detection, draw implications to edge-assisted AR research, and pose open problems that warrant further investigation into this surprise finding.