Modeling QoE of Virtual Reality Video Transmission over Wireless Networks

Virtual Reality (VR) provides an immersive 360 viewing experience and has been widely used in vast areas such as education, entertainment and training. To further widen its applications, networked 360 VR video becomes essential. Quality of Experience (QoE), which objectively measures user experience, is vital for 360 VR video transmission mechanism design. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are few subjective QoE metric for 360 VR video transmission over wireless networks. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by proposing a general QoE model based on subjective quality evaluation experiments. First, the state-of-the-art 360 VR video processing and wireless transmission schemes are used to conduct subjective experiments according to the international standard. Then, how user experience is affected by different factors, including users' viewing angle, tiling (how the 360 VR video is partitioned into smaller parts to facilitate transmission), stall and resolution switch, is analyzed mathematically. A general QoE model is finally proposed to facilitate the future 360 VR video streaming mechanism design.