Multi-MEC Cooperation Based VR Video Transmission and Cache Using K-Shortest Paths Optimization

In recent network architectures, multi-MEC cooperative caching has been introduced to reduce the transmission latency of VR videos, in which MEC servers’ computing and caching capability are utilized to optimize the transmission process. However, many solutions that use the computing capability of MEC servers ignore the additional arithmetic power consumed by the codec process, thus making them infeasible. Besides, the minimum cache unit is usually the entire VR video, which makes caching inefficient. To address these challenges, we split VR videos into tile files for caching based on the current popular network architecture and provide a reliable transmission mechanism and an effective caching strategy. Since the number of different tile files N is too large, the current cooperative caching algorithms do not cope with such large-scale input data. We further analyze the problem and propose an optimized k-shortest paths (OKSP) algorithm with an upper bound time complexity of $$O((K \cdot M + N) \cdot M \cdot \log N))$$ , and suitable for shortest paths with restricted number of edges, where K is the total number of tiles that all M MEC servers can cache in the collaboration domain. And we prove the OKSP algorithm can compute the caching scheme with the lowest average latency in any case, which means the solution given is the exact solution. The simulation results show that the OKSP algorithm has excellent speed for solving large-scale data and consistently outperforms other caching algorithms in the experiments.