Optimizing Resource Allocation for Wireless VR Services

The virtual reality (VR) market is expected to reach 202.7 billion dollars by 2028, at a compound annual growth rate of 24.74% over the forecast period 2023-2028. It motivates innovative VR services in touring, E-commerce, and social activities, and effective VR video streaming becomes essential. However, VR services are envisaged to consume a large amount of bandwidth, but current research primarily focuses on multimedia streaming for each individual user without considering the opportunity of view synthesis for multicast to reduce wireless resource consumption further. In this article, we formulate a new optimization problem VR Content Sharing and Multicasting (VCSM) and prove the NP-hardness. Then, we propose an approximation algorithm, named Efficient View Synthesis and Multicasting (EVSM), to select multicast views and their Modulation and Coding Schemes (MCS) for wireless VR services. Afterward, we extend EVSM to support dynamic user behaviors and increase scalability with distributed mobile edge computing. We also explore the intrinsic properties of view selections to find the optimal solution for regular user deployment. Experiment results show that EVSM can effectively reduce bandwidth consumption for VR services by more than 50%.