Caching and Computing at the Edge for Mobile Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) in 5G

The enormous increase in powerful mobile devices has created hype for mobile data traffic. The demand for high definition images and good quality video streaming for the mobile users has constantly being escalated over the recent decade. In particular, the newly emerging mobile Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) applications are anticipated to be among the most demanding applications over wireless networks so far. The architecture of the cellular networks has been centralized over the years, which makes the wireless link capacity, bandwidth and backhaul network difficult to cope with the explosive growth in the mobile user traffic. Along with the rise in overall network traffic, mobile users tend to seek similar types of data at different time instants creating a bottleneck in the backhaul link. To overcome such challenges in a network, emerging techniques of caching the popular content and performing computation at the edge are gaining importance. The emergence of such techniques for near future 5G networks would pose less pressure on the backhaul links as well as the cloud servers, thereby, reducing the end-to-end latency of AR/VR applications. This paper surveys the recent edge computing techniques along with the powerful caching strategies at the edge and provides a roadmap for 5G and beyond wireless networks in the context of emerging applications.