Service Entity Placement for Social Virtual Reality Applications in Edge Computing

While social Virtual Reality (VR) applications such as Facebook Spaces are becoming popular, they are not compatible with classic mobile-or cloud-based solutions due to their processing of tremendous data and exchange of delay-sensitive metadata. Edge computing may fulfill these demands better, but it is still an open problem to deploy social VR applications in an edge infrastructure while supporting economic operations of the edge clouds and satisfactory quality-of-service for the users. This paper presents the first formal study of this problem. We model and formulate a combinatorial optimization problem that captures all intertwined goals. We propose ITEM, an iterative algorithm with fast and big “moves” where in each iteration, we construct a graph to encode all the costs and convert the cost optimization into a graph cut problem. By obtaining the minimum s-t cut via existing max-flow algorithms, we can simultaneously determine the placement of multiple service entities, and thus, the original problem can be addressed by solving a series of graph cuts. Our evaluations with large-scale, real-world data traces demonstrate that ITEM converges fast and outperforms baseline approaches by more than 2 × in one-shot placement and around 1.3 × in dynamic, online scenarios where users move arbitrarily in the system.

I. Introduction

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are commonly believed to be the killer applications for the emerging edge computing paradigm [1], where resources are available for service provisioning in much closer proximity to end users with low-delay and low-jitter network connections. VR fits well in this paradigm due to its resource-hungry and delay-sensitive nature. As an inevitable technology trend, VR has gained popularity. Recently at WWDC 2017, Apple released a new tool ARKit for developing VR applications on its platforms. In the meanwhile, Facebook is augmenting its social network with Virtual/Augmented Reality and recently, it released its new social network platform named Spaces.