Toward Truly Immersive Holographic-Type Communication: Challenges and Solutions

With significant advances in holographic display technology, a plethora of interactive applications, such as tele-conferencing and tele-surgery, are well on their way to integrating holographic technologies. However, hologram-based applications will place significant demands on networking infrastructure, which are not supported today. These include support for ultra-low delays, high bandwidth, and the ability to coordinate, synchronize, and dynamically adapt multiple data streams. This article articulates these challenges and points out gaps in existing networks that solutions must address. In addition, it provides an experimental analysis of novel network architectures that address one of these challenges, namely the ability to dynamically set up new flows with very low latency incurred by the first packet.