UAV Placement for VR Reconstruction: A Tradeoff Between Resolution and Delay

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can be combined with virtual reality (VR) to collect the rapidly changing physical environment by leveraging its high flexibility, so as to provide an immersive experience for metaverse users. In this letter, we study the UAV placement problem in UAV-assisted VR systems where UAVs are deployed to capture images of ground targets and then transmit them to ground users for virtual environment reconstruction. The goal is to minimize the transmission delay while satisfying the image resolution requirement. Firstly, the UAV placement problem is formulated into a non-convex optimization problem. Then, an efficient algorithm is proposed to obtain a high-quality solution by adopting the block coordinate descent and successive convex approximation techniques with low complexity. Finally, the numerical results are provided and show that considerable benefits can be obtained with a suboptimal UAV placement. Specifically, the proposed scheme can reduce the transmission delay by over 15 ms compared to the conventional scheme when the received signal-to-noise ratio at the reference distance is <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$10^{6}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and the resolution requirement is 0.5.