Computing Offloading Over mmWave for Mobile VR: Make 360 Video Streaming Alive

Compared with previous video streaming technologies, 360 video streaming is an emerging technology in commercial platforms that promise greater immersive video service. The use of 360 video streaming requires larger bandwidth and rapid responsiveness to users. In addition, mobile virtual-reality (VR) devices locally process video decoding, post-processing, and rendering. However, its performance is insufficient to stream high-resolution videos such as 4k–8k. Therefore, we propose an adaptive computing offloading scheme using millimeter wave (mmWave) communication. This offloading scheme helps mobile device sharing video decoding tasks to a powerful GPU-based PC. It allows the mobile VR device enhancing the capability of playing high-resolution videos. The mmWave 802.11ad wireless technology promises the use of high-bandwidth wireless communication to improve the capacity of multimedia systems. However, the current studies on video transmission over 802.11ad mmWave are specifically focused on supporting the outdoor environment. Furthermore, synchronization is an essential issue for ensuring the quality of service (QoS) of 360 video transmission. Thus, the proposed scheme concentrates on two parts: 1) 360 video streaming in an indoor environment, and offloading mechanism using mmWave 802.11ad 60-GHz wireless communication to offload video coding tasks and 2) adaptive video synchronization mechanisms, and high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) using scalable HEVC extension for 360 videos with equirectangular projection. The experiments prove that the proposed scheme provides high performance 360 video streaming in QoS-sensitive video streaming applications.