MEC-Enabled Cooperative Rendering in Metaverse: A Coalition Formation Game Approach

Virtual Reality (VR) paves the way to link Meta-verse and the real world, allowing users to enjoy immersive experiences. However, delivering high-quality full spherical VR service within limited rendering energy is a challenge. Mobile edge computing (MEC) is a promising paradigm to provide rendering computation services to users. It is widely held that the rendering of panoramic video presents a significant impediment in the VR system, with disregard for the importance of the data correlation leading to excessive energy consumption caused by repeated rendering. In this paper, we propose a cooperative rendering scheme in mm Wave-enabled wireless networks with MEC via a coalition formation game, among which we focus on the data correlation of the background environment of VR streams. Specifically, we first devise a multiple MEC servers rendering framework, and we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the system utility, which contains energy savings for MEC servers and users' quality of experience (QoE). Then, considering the overlap of the VR streams requested by users in Metaverse, a coalition formation game is employed to model the cooperations among MEC servers, such that the user's QoE is significantly improved. The simulation experiments show that our proposed algorithm is superior to benchmark algorithms in improving the users' QoE and reducing the total energy consumption of MEC servers.