NOMA Assisted Two-Tier VR Content Transmission: A Tile-Based Approach for QoE Optimization

Virtual reality (VR) provides users with an immersive and interactive experience through head-mounted devices, which has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Specifically, tile-based VR content transmission provides a promising approach to alleviate the conflict between limited bandwidth and high-performance requirements (e.g., high-resolution and low-delay). However, the tiling pattern affects the encoding efficiency and visual distortion of the VR content. Accounting for this issue, in this paper, a quality of experience (QoE)-aware cost minimization problem is investigated for a tile-based VR content transmission scenario. In particular, an edge server (ES) co-located at a cellular base station (BS) separates its generated VR content into several tiles according to the tiling pattern selection, and a weighted-to-spherically-uniform quality model is used to evaluate the effect of different tiling patterns on QoE. Moreover, to improve the transmission performance between the edge server and VR users (VRUs), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are leveraged as relay points to provide line of sight channels. Then, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the sum of weighted total energy consumption and VR content distortion (i.e., QoE-aware cost) by jointly optimizing the tiling pattern selections, the VRUs-UAV grouping, partial computing decisions, and resource allocation. The formulated problem is a mixed integer non-linear programming problem, which is challenging to solve. To address this difficulty, we equivalently decompose the formulated problem into three subproblems and propose corresponding algorithms to solve them, respectively. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed solution can effectively reduce the QoE-aware cost for VR content transmission in comparison with other baseline algorithms.