Scalable Multicast for Live 360-Degree Video Streaming Over Mobile Networks

Thanks to its ability to provide immersive experience to users, 360-degree video has become one of the key enablers of Virtual Reality. However, the huge data size of 360-degree video poses a challenging problem for live streaming of this special type of video over resource-constrained networks. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for live 360-degree video streaming to multiple users over mobile networks. Our proposed framework jointly utilizes Scalable Video Coding and multicast to deliver 360 video to users in a bandwidth-efficient manner. In particular, 360-degree video is split into small parts called tiles, each is encoded into multiple layers using Scalable Video Encoding. The proposed framework then selects suitable tile layers to maximize the overall Quality of Experience of all users. To support real-time adaptation, we design a Linear Regression-based algorithm to estimate the weights of tiles of individual users. In addition, an efficient algorithm for deciding the suitable tile layers and their transmission modes is proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly improve the average viewport quality compared to state-of-the-art methods.