# A 5G-Based VR Application for Efficient Port Management
## 1 Introduction  
With the development of the shipping industry, the number of ships sailing abroad has increased dramatically in the past few years. At the same time, the governments of port states have to face severe maritime security situations brought by foreign ships. In particular, large cargo ships and cargo trucks can cause accidents due to bad weather and human factors. What is more, it can endanger the lives of people and cause large-scale economic losses [1]. International ports have a high demand for smart applications to save cost and increase productivity when they serve as an important hub of international trade, logistics, and global supply chain [2; 3]. The requirements of a smart port include autonomous loading and unloading, all-around visibility, intelligent management and control, intelligent decision-making, and flexible collaboration [4; 5]. The key to addressing the requirements is to enable comprehensive perception and extensive interconnection of the smart port. The traditional smart port mainly relies on physical camera equipment to support the monitoring of terminal information and a closed-circuit television (CCTV) network to obtain local information [6; 7; 8]. The action for emergencies relies on remote operation through the information gathered from the cameras or local operation by nearby workers. However, both solutions suffer a long latency because of communication delay or visual impairment caused by bad weather. Late action will make the port face the potential risk of economic loss such as damage to machines. The smart port requires a short delay, large bandwidth, and high reliability for the perception and the requirements of flexible operation methods to react to emergencies. The in-depth integration of a new generation of information technology (e.g., the Internet, big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, etc.) and industrial enterpriseswill promote the industrial digital transformation. With the commercial deployment of the 5G networks, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has become a promising infrastructural technology to support various business models and applications for many small companies in the industry [4]. MEC platforms integrate computation and communication technology, which have greatly empowered vertical industries by exploring their new applications in vertical industries [9; 10; 11]. By pushing computation services close to the end-users, MEC can better satisfy the needs of various vertical application domains for high bandwidth, low latency, high computing power, and high security [4; 5; 6]. Novel applications over 5G such as virtual reality (VR) [12; 13] bring new opportunities to smart ports [14; 15]. VR-based smart port applications emerge to promote efficiency or sustainability for transportation services [15]. They provide a 360-degree panoramic picture, allowing users to immerse themselves in the scene, with a better sense of space and distance, to achieve a truly immersive interaction. However, the existing attempts on such kinds of applications can only provide very limited functions. Their application architectures are still more cloud-based, which fails to unleash the full potential of the 5G infrastructure. For example, many roaming requirements in a smart port, such as interactive repair of local equipment and remote multi-person collaboration, will need frequent interaction with the local environment. Cloud-based architecture can easily cause network congestion when multiple VR hardware devices keep requesting services such as positioning and model rendering. In addition, heterogeneous equipment in a smart port requires extra communication costs to achieve remote control, which will eventually affect the Quality of Experience (QoE) for the users. The encryption process for data transmission will also cause a latency increase. This paper proposes a novel smart port application that is enabled by 5G and virtual reality (VR) technologies.