Rate Splitting for Mobile Edge Computing Assisted Multiuser Virtual Reality Systems

With the growing demand for virtual reality (VR) applications, mobile wireless networks should support the connections of a massive number of VR users. To support ultra-high data rates of multiple simultaneously transmitted VR streamings, we propose a mobile edge computing (MEC)-assisted rate splitting (RS) VR streaming transmission system. In the proposed system, RS technology exploits the shared interests of multiple VR users and MEC offloads the partial rendering tasks to achieve a better quality of experience (QoE) for VR users. Aiming to minimize the total weighted energy consumption, we formulate a joint communication and computing resource optimization problem while ensuring the required distortion and latency of VR users. To deal with the formulated intractable problem, we propose a joint rendering offloading and resource allocation algorithm that alternately solves the subproblems of quantization parameters selection, rendering offloading decision, transmit precoding design, rate allocation of RS transmission, and computing resource allocation. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in saving energy consumption. Specially, the performance of the proposed algorithm is 22.1% higher than that of the multicast-unicast scheme and can achieve 95.9% of the exhaustive search based algorithm.