UAV-Assisted Edge Computing and Streaming for Wireless Virtual Reality: Analysis, Algorithm Design, and Performance Guarantees

Emerging virtual reality (
VR
) applications require high data rate transmission and low end-to-end latency, which has become one of the main challenges for future wireless networks. Unmanned aerial vehicle (
UAV
) mounted base stations and computing facilities can be used to provide better wireless connectivity and computing services to edge VR users to meet their computing needs and reduce the end-to-end latency. We propose a novel UAV assisted mobile edge computing (
MEC
) network to enable high-quality mobile 360-degree video VR applications by leveraging UAVs to provide the required communication and computing needs. Then, we formulate the joint
UAV
placement,
M
EC and radio resource allocation, and 360-degree
v
ideo content layer assignment (
UAV-MV
) problem, which aims to select the allocation of computing and communications resources and the location of the UAVs such that the delivered quality of experience (
QoE
) is maximized across the mobile VR users, given various system constraints. We show that the problem is NP-hard, and decompose it into three lower-complexity subproblems that we solve sequentially. We design an approximation algorithm with performance guarantees that solves the UAV-MV problem based on the solutions to the three subproblems. Our simulation results show that the average QoE enabled by the proposed algorithm is 15% and 90% greater relative to two competitive reference methods.