Enabling Cognitive Load-Aware AR with Rateless Coding on a Wearable Network

Augmented reality (AR) on a head-mounted display is conveniently supported by a wearable wireless network. If, in addition, the AR display is moderated to take account of the cognitive load of the wearer, then additional biosensors form part of the network. In this paper, the impact of these additional traffic sources is assessed. Rateless coding is proposed to not only protect the fragile encoded video stream from wireless noise and interference but also to reduce coding overhead. The paper proposes a block-based form of rateless channel coding in which the unit of coding is a block within a packet. The contribution of this paper is that it minimizes energy consumption by reducing the overhead from forward error correction (FEC), while error correction properties are conserved. Compared to simple packet-based rateless coding, with this form of block-based coding, data loss is reduced and energy efficiency is improved. Cross-layer organization of piggy-backed response blocks must take place in response to feedback, as detailed in the paper. Compared also to variants of the default FEC scheme, results from a Bluetooth (IEEE 802.15.1) wireless network show a consistent improvement in energy consumption, packet arrival latency, and video quality at the AR display.