Energy consumption assessment of a Virtual Reality Remote Rendering application over 5G networks

This paper investigates the energy implications of remote rendering for Virtual Reality (VR) applications within a real 5G testbed. Remote rendering enables lightweight devices to access high-performance graphical content by offloading computationally intensive tasks to Cloud-native Network Functions (CNFs) running on remote servers. However, this approach raises concerns regarding energy consumption across the various network components involved, including the remote computing node, the 5G Core, the Radio Access Network (RAN), and the User Equipment (UE). This work proposes and evaluates two complementary energy monitoring solutions, one hardware-based and one software-based, to measure energy consumption at different system levels. A VR remote renderer, deployed as CNF and leveraging the Media over QUIC (MoQ) protocol, is used as test case for assessing its energy footprint under different multimedia and network configurations. The results provide critical insights into the trade-off between energy consumption and performance of a real-world VR application running in a 5G environment.