QoE-Guaranteed Optimization in MEC-Enabled Metaverse: An Active Inference Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

In this paper, we consider a MEC-enabled metaverse scenario which consists of a remote metaverse server and an edge server that cooperates to provide services to mobile users. The edge server is deployed at the base station (BS), serves a dual role: augmenting computational capabilities for user equipment (UE) and pre-caching a portion of the metaverse service contents before each time slot. Moreover, the foreground information and the requested contents generated by the UEs can also be cached to the BS. We formulate a problem to maximize the cache hit number by jointly optimizing contents pre-caching and resource allocation at the BS while considering UEs preference and reducing the UEs total energy consumption, essential for the efficient delivery of services in dynamic MEC environments. To solve this problem, we reformulate it as a partially observable markov decision process and propose an active inference enabled deep reinforcement learning algorithm, which combines active inference with deep reinforcement learning to select the optimal strategy by minimizing the expected free energy. Simulations show that the proposed algorithm can effectively improve the total quality of experience and the cache hit number of UEs, while minimizing the UEs total energy consumption compared with other baseline algorithms.