Research

Medical Applications

Our goal is to use XR and low latency wireless to bring real-time access to medical experts to assist with complex cases and provide medical training to personnel and students located anywhere, especially remote/rural areas. We consider four use cases of increasing difficulty:

1. Congestive Heart Failure Simulation for Medical Education and Training
2. Collaborative, Real-Time Medical Training Simulation
3. AR-guided medical procedures with distributed XR
4. Critical Remote Ultrasound-Guided Drainage Procedure in a Moving Ambulance

XR Runtime

We propose to develop and deploy an XR runtime architecture, ILLIXR-Net, that, for the first time, promotes XR application-runtime-network codesign by enabling the runtime to:

1. Tolerate network latency
2. Adapt network demand to the network conditions and application requirements
3. Inform the application and the network about their requirements, enabling network services aligned with heterogeneous application needs.

Network Transport Layer

Our multi-channel transport protocol introduces a fine-grained steering mechanism—per-packet rather than per-application—that leverages application-level
descriptions of messages’ performance requirements. This solution takes the form of our Latency-Aware Multi-Path Protocol (LAMP).

Wireless Service

The Agora Project will support underlying connectivity that is either cellular (5G) or WiFi. Supporting both provides coverage in more situations: A moving ambulance likely has only 5G service, a point of care in a rural area may have only WiFi, and a hospital in a city may have both. Agora can utilize dual connectivity (5G + WiFi) simultaneously, providing more options to the LAMP which it can use to improve latency or reliability.