360-ADAPT: An Open-RAN-Based Adaptive Scheme for Quality Enhancement of Opera 360° Content Distribution

There is increasing viewer interest and technological support for streaming immersive clips over the Internet. There are, however, challenges in supporting high quality of viewer experience, mostly due to the large amounts of the data associated with immersive video and spatial audio (Ambisonics). In situations where there are limited network resources, the streamed 360° content needs to be adjusted dynamically to meet the network constraints. Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) adaptation is a key technology for delivering high-quality video over open radio access networks (RANs). DASH allows for efficient adaptation of video streams to the available network conditions. This paper introduces 360-ADAPT, a DASH-based adaptation solution on an Open-RAN architecture for increased quality remote 360° opera experiences. Unlike existing schemes, 360-ADAPT gives precedence to audio over the video when selecting bitrates, increasing the overall quality of the artistic act and improving use of resources and energy. The proposed 360-ADAPT was tested with real opera viewers in the context of an artistic-oriented platform for opera delivery, part of the Horizon2020 TRACTION project. Results indicate that 360-ADAPT achieves higher perceived quality levels than alternative solutions both in QoS and QoE metrics.