Abstract

the last few years, we have seen a surge of interest in telepresence video collaborative technologies where remote users perform virtual-reality-like interactions with each other using real-time 3D video. Though the initial focus was on video conferencing applications, recent developments in audio-video and network technologies have expanded the horizon by supporting full-body interaction for many other physical activities in the virtual environment. Despite great potential, 3D tele-immersive (3DTI) sessions still face significant challenges due to high interactivity, multi-stream dependency, multi-view dynamism and large resource demand. Quality of service (QoS) allocation in 3DTI sessions not only depends on the availability of network and processing resources, but also on the users ’ expectations, which are dynamic and heterogenous. In this dissertation, we revisit the design space of 3DTI session management framework. We propose a novel, comprehensive, user-experience-aware, programmable, cross-layer session control framework for 3DTI applications. Our control framework consists of a distributed monitoring oracle, a decision engine for computing userexperience-aware multi-stream dissemination topology, and a controller for allocating