Viewport-Adaptive Scalable Multi-User Virtual Reality Mobile-Edge Streaming

• Published in: IEEE transactions on image processing Vol. 29; pp. 6330 - 6342
• Main Author: Chakareski, Jacob
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.01.2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: 5G small cell systems; Base stations; branch-and-prune fully-polynomial time approximation method; Caching; Communications systems; Digital media; Edge computing; Energy conservation; Impact analysis; mobile edge computing and streaming; Mobile virtual reality; Multilayers; multiple knapsack problem with multiple constraints; Navigation; Optimization; Radio equipment; Resource allocation; Resource management; scalable 360° video tiling; Servers; Signal to noise ratio; statistical VR navigation analysis; Streaming media; Tiling; Virtual reality
• ISSN: 1057-7149; 1941-0042; 1941-0042
• DOI: 10.1109/TIP.2020.2986547

Virtual reality (VR) holds tremendous potential to advance our society, expected to make impact on quality of life, energy conservation, and the economy. To bring us closer to this vision, the present paper investigates a novel communications system that integrates for the first time scalable multi-layer 360° video tiling, viewport-adaptive rate-distortion optimal resource allocation, and VR-centric edge computing and caching, to enable next generation high-quality untethered VR streaming. Our system comprises a collection of 5G small cells that can pool their communication, computing, and storage resources to collectively deliver scalable 360° video content to mobile VR clients at much higher quality. The major contributions of the paper are the rigorous design of multi-layer 360° tiling and related models of statistical user navigation, analysis and optimization of edge-based multi-user VR streaming that integrates viewport adaptation and server cooperation, and base station 360° video packet scheduling. We also explore the possibility of network coded data operation and its implications for the analysis, optimization, and system performance we pursue in this setting. The advances introduced by our framework over the state-of-the-art comprise considerable gains in delivered immersion fidelity, featuring much higher 360° viewport peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and VR video frame rates and spatial resolutions.