TENET: Adaptive Service Chain Orchestrator for MEC-Enabled Low-Latency 6DoF Virtual Reality

The next generation of Virtual Reality (VR) applications is expected to provide advanced experiences through Six Degrees of Freedom (6DoF) content, which requires higher data rates and ultra-low latency. In this article, we refactor 6DoF VR applications into atomic services to increase the computing capacity of VR systems aiming to reduce the end-to-end (E2E) of 6DoF VR applications. Those services are chained and deployed across Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) servers in high mobility scenarios over real-edge network topologies. We investigate the Distributed Service Chain Problem (DSCP) to find the optimal service placement of services from a service chain such that its E2E latency does not exceed 5 ms. The DSCP problem is
$\mathcal {NP}$
-hard. We provide an integer linear program to model the system, along with a heuristic, namely disTributed sErvice chaiN orchEstraTor (TENET), which is one order of magnitude faster than optimally solving the DSCP problem. We compare TENET to DSCP implementation and well-known service migration algorithms in terms of E2E latency, power consumption, video resolution selection based on E2E latency, context migrations, and execution time. We observe a significant reduction of E2E latency and gains in more advanced video resolution selection and accepted context service migrations when using TENET’s deployment strategy on VR services.