Performance measurements of 360° video streaming to head-mounted displays over live 4G cellular networks

Watching 360° videos using Head-Mounted Display (HMD) allows users to only see a part of the whole 360° videos. With this feature, tiled videos become a potential solution for aggressively reducing the required bandwidth for 360° video streaming, turning it into a reality in cellular networks. In this paper, we design several experiments for quantifying the performance of tile-based 360° video streaming over a real cellular network on our campus. In particular, we empirically investigate the impacts of tile streaming over 4G networks, such as coding efficiency, bandwidth saving, and scalability. Our experiments lead to interesting findings, for example, (i) only streaming the tiles viewed by the viewer achieves bitrate reduction by up to 80% and (ii) the coding efficiency of 3×3 tiled videos may be higher than non-tiled videos at higher bitrates. We believe this work will stimulate more studies in the emerging area of mobile AR/VR (Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality) over 4G networks.