Joint Radio Communication, Caching, and Computing Design for Mobile Virtual Reality Delivery in Fog Radio Access Networks

The emerging virtual reality (VR) experience demands ultra-high-transmission-rate and ultra-low-latency deliveries, which is challenging for the current cellular networks. Since fog radio access networks (F-RANs) take full advantages of both edge fog computing and caching technologies and benefit different quality-of-service requirements, it is anticipated that high-quality VR experience could be well addressed in F-RANs. This paper presents an F-RAN-based mobile VR delivery framework, in which the core idea is to cache parts of the VR videos in advance and run a certain processing procedure at the edge of F-RANs. To optimize resource allocation at both mobile VR devices and fog access points (F-APs), a joint radio communication, caching and computing decision problem is formulated to maximize the average tolerant delay with meeting a given transmission rate constraint. This problem is formulated as a multiple choice multiple dimensional knapsack problem and solved with the Lagrangian dual decomposition approach. Furthermore, the optimal joint caching and computing decision is analyzed in a specific case with a closed-form expression of the average tolerant delay. The communications-caching-computing tradeoff at both mobile VR devices and F-APs is revealed, and the numerical results demonstrate that local caching and computing capabilities have significant impacts on the average tolerant delay. The proposed mobile VR delivery framework is promising in improving spectral efficiency by maximizing average tolerant delay while meeting high transmission rate requirements.