Joint uplink and downlink resource allocation for low-latency mobile virtual reality delivery in fog radio access networks

• Published in: Frontiers of information technology & electronic engineering Vol. 23; no. 1; pp. 73 - 85
• Main Authors: Dang, Tian, Liu, Chenxi, Liu, Xiqing, Yan, Shi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hangzhou Zhejiang University Press 01.01.2022; Springer Nature B.V; State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology,Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications,Beijing 100876,China
• Subjects: Algorithms; Caching; Communication; Communications Engineering; Computation; Computer Hardware; Computer Science; Computer Systems Organization and Communication Networks; Downlinking; Electrical Engineering; Electronics and Microelectronics; Instrumentation; Network latency; Networks; Research Article; Resource allocation; Uplinking; Virtual reality; Wireless networks; Fog radio access network (F-RAN); 资源分配; 雾无线接入网络; Round-trip latency; TN914; 往返时延; Resource allocation; 虚拟现实分发; Virtual reality delivery
• ISSN: 2095-9184; 2095-9230
• DOI: 10.1631/FITEE.2100308

Fog radio access networks (F-RANs), in which the fog access points are equipped with communication, caching, and computing functionalities, have been anticipated as a promising architecture for enabling virtual reality (VR) applications in wireless networks. Although extensive research efforts have been devoted to designing efficient resource allocation strategies for realizing successful mobile VR delivery in downlink, the equally important resource allocation problem of mobile VR delivery in uplink has so far drawn little attention. In this work, we investigate a mobile VR F-RAN delivery framework, where both the uplink and downlink transmissions are considered. We first characterize the round-trip latency of the system, which reveals its dependence on the communication, caching, and computation resource allocations. Based on this information, we propose a simple yet efficient algorithm to minimize the round-trip latency, while satisfying the practical constraints on caching, computation capability, and transmission capacity in the uplink and downlink. Numerical results show that our proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the round-trip latency compared with various baselines, and the impacts of communication, caching, and computing resources on latency performance are illustrated.