Collaborative Research: Ideas Lab: Democratizing Low Latency Wireless for Remote XR Medical Collaboration

This project will advance next generation wireless technology to substantially reduce communication delay, known as latency, such that low latency communication service can become economically and broadly available. The project develops this technology for remote medical collaboration applications, to make medical specialists and clinicians available when they are urgently needed. Extended reality (XR) technology, including virtual reality and augmented reality, could allow remote specialists to assist on-site personnel, but enabling such real-time shared experiences critically depends on the availability of low latency wireless networking which is not generally deployed. This project will create an innovative system and platform that delivers low-latency wireless XR for remote medical collaboration, or LXM. LXM will solve technology barriers that ease deployment of low latency service for a wide range of applications even beyond medicine. The project is thus advancing U.S. global leadership in next-generation wireless technology, enabling timely patient medical response, and developing the U.S. workforce in wireless networking and XR-based medical collaboration. The project will develop both XR-based medical applications and the underlying networking technology stack to enable practically deployable low latency wireless service. It will also develop surgical planning and medical training applications that support remote collaboration and cross-layer performance requirement signaling. These will leverage new capabilities in underlying systems to provide (1) fine-grained heterogeneous network service, to enable using low latency service judiciously which results in an improved tradeoff between network latency and network bandwidth; (2) dynamic adaptivity to deal with variable network conditions; and (3) cross-layer performance intent signaling, so the technology stack can make good context-sensitive, application-aware decisions. Achieving these properties will involve new innovations in the XR runtime, transport protocol, 5G radio access network (RAN) and user equipment (UE), and will leverage advanced low-latency WiFi. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.