Mobile VR Edge Delivery: Computing, Caching, and Communication Trade-Offs

We study the delivery of 360°-navigable videos to 5G virtual reality (VR) wireless clients in future cooperative multi-cellular systems. A collection of small cell base stations interconnected via backhaul links are sharing their caching and computing resources to maximize the aggregate reward they earn by serving 360° videos requested by the wireless clients. We design an efficient representation method to construct the 360° videos such that they deliver only the remote scene viewpoint content genuinely needed by the VR users, thereby overcoming the present highly inefficient approach of sending a bulky 360° video, whose major part is made up of scene information never navigated by a user. Moreover, we design an optimization framework that allows the base stations to select cooperative caching/rendering/streaming strategies that maximize the aggregate reward they earn when serving the users for the given caching/computational resources at each base station.