Enabling Mobile Virtual Reality with Open 5G, Fog Computing and Reinforcement Learning

Virtual reality (VR) is an emerging technology reshaping interactive experience and can be widely applied in gaming, operation training, and so on. Despite its great potentials, most existing VR solutions suffer from low mobility support, high latency, quick battery drain, as well as high cost of user devices. To overcome these issues, a mobile VR system is designed and implemented. The basic idea is to take advantage of 5G and fog computing to realize high bandwidth and low latency VR service. Meanwhile, our design features the integration of an open 5G base station (BS) and an intelligent controller. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI) and the interfaces provided by the BS and fog VR servers, the controller can wisely adjust both the BS-level and application-level parameters to enhance system performance. Using our prototype system, the impact of various parameters, the superiority of fog computing over cloud computing in supporting VR, and the effectiveness of AI in optimizing system performance are all demonstrated. In addition, multi-dimensional resource optimization for VR delivery and strategy design for VR service migration are identified as two promising future research directions.