Multiuser Access Control for 360° VR Video Service Systems Exploiting Proactive Caching and Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile virtual reality (VR) is considered a killer application for future mobile broadband networks. However, for cloud VR, the long content delivery path and time-varying transmission rate from the content provider’s cloud VR server to the users make the quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning for VR users very challenging. To this end, in this paper, we design a 360° VR video service system that leverages proactive caching and mobile edge computing (MEC) technologies. Furthermore, we propose a multiuser access control algorithm tailored to the system, based on analytical results of the delay violation probability, which is derived considering the impact of both the multi-hop wired network from the cloud VR server to the MEC server and the wireless network from the MEC server-connected base station (BS) to the users. The proposed access control algorithm aims to maximize the number of served users by exploiting real-time and dynamic network resources, while ensuring that the end-to-end delay violation probability for each accessed user remains within an acceptable limit. Simulation results are presented to analyze the impact of diverse system parameters on both the user access probability and the delay violation probability of the accessed users, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed multiuser access control algorithm. It is observed in the simulation that increasing the computing capacity of the MEC server or the communication bandwidth of the BS is one of the most effective methods to accommodate more users for the system. In the tested scenarios, when the MEC server’s computing capacity (the BS’s bandwidth) increases from 0.8 Tbps (50 MHz) to 3.2 Tbps (150 MHz), the user access probability improves on average by 92.53% (85.49%).