Mobile Edge Resource optimization for Multiplayer Interactive Virtual Reality Game

Edge computing has been regarded as an efficient approach to achieve the multiplayer interactive virtual reality (VR) game over wireless networks, where the game scenes can be rendered at the edge computing server and then the real-time video frames can be transmitted to the players. In order to ensure the fairness of the interacting players, we allocate the edge computing and wireless bandwidth resources for minimizing the average inter-player delay among different players. The proposed programming is under the constraints of the absolute delay requirements, the maximum frame per second (FPS) demands, the total bandwidth and rendering resources limits. The influence of prediction and pre-rendering field of views (FOVs) is also considered in the optimization problem to model the interaction among players. To tackle the non-convex problem efficiently, a sub-optimal algorithm which convert the original problem into several convex subproblems to optimize iteratively is designed. Finally, numerical results verify the proposed algorithm can reduce the average interplayer delay significantly with lower complexity, and it also reveals the impact of the content sizes and the channel state conditions on the edge resource allocation.

I. Introduction

Virtual reality (VR) game is getting popular in recent years, because it provides immersive virtual world and allows players to interact with that world in the game. A recent market report forecasts that the global VR game market will reach 48.2 billion USD by 2026 [1]. VR game over wireless allows users much greater freedom of movement. However, leveraging mobile networks for transmitting VR game is very challenging for two reasons. First, VR game consumes huge data, yielding extremely high data rates, since a 360° VR game is much larger in resolutions (e.g., 4K) for immersive and user-friendly experience [2], [3]. Secondly, for traditional mobile games, it only needs 100 ms to provide a positive game experience, but VR game, experiences require extremely low latency (less than 20 ms). Nevertheless, this challenge makes designing a cloud-based VR game system quite difficult, because a cloud server would take between 80 and 200 ms to communicate with a VR device.