Multicast with View Synthesis for Wireless Virtual Reality

With the emergence of innovative applications for Virtual Reality (VR) in touring, E-commerce, and social activities, high-quality VR video streaming becomes essential. To support numerous wireless VR users, this paper aims to leverage video synthesis techniques to effectively reduce the multicast bandwidth consumption. It synthesizes the view in the video for a user from the one of a nearby user with similar Field of View (FoV), under the virtual distance and view angle constraints. We first formulate a new optimization problem, named VR Content Sharing and Multicasting (VCSM), and prove the NP-hardness. Then, we propose View Sharing Relation Graph (VSRG) to model the synthesis relation between each pair of views. We then design a new algorithm, named Bandwidth-Efficient Multicast with Synthesis (BEMS) to select multicast views and the corresponding MCS in wireless networks. Simulation results show that BEMS can effectively reduce bandwidth consumption by more than 50% compared with state-of-the-art wireless transmission schemes.