MEC-Enabled Wireless VR Video Service: A Learning-Based Mixed Strategy for Energy-Latency Tradeoff
Chong Zheng, Shengheng Liu, Yongming Huang, Lüxi Yang
Abstract
Mobile edge computing (MEC) has received broad attention as an effective network architecture and a key enabler of the wireless virtual reality (VR) video service which is expected to take a huge share of communication traffic. In this work, we investigate the scenario of multi-tiles-based wireless VR video service with the aid of MEC network, where the primary objective is to minimize the system energy consumption and the latency as well as to arrive at a tradeoff between these two metrics. To this end, we first cast the time-varying view popularity as a model-free Markov chain and use a long short-term memory autoencoder network to predict its dynamics. Then, a mixed strategy, which jointly considers the dynamic caching replacement and the deterministic offloading, is designed to fully utilize the caching and computing resource in the system. The underlying multiobjective optimization problem is reformulated as a partially observable Markov decision process and solved by using a deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is confirmed by numerical simulations.