Joint Rate and FoV adaptation in immersive video streaming

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Abstract

The responsiveness of the network is critical when the application is immersive video streaming or 360 degree video streaming. The users look at the video stream on a display that can only show a fraction of the full video stream, and the time that the information spend in transit dramatically impacts the QoE of the end user. Fur- ther, transmitting a 360 degree video stream significantly increases the bandwidth usage and the impact on the already strained net- work. We propose a mechanism to use the responsiveness of the network to perform a Field of View (FoV) adaptation, so as to reduce the bandwidth consumption while at the same time enhancing the QoE of the user. In our simulation, such mechanism significantly improves the resolution seen by the end user, by selecting a higher bit rate. This translates to an improvement of up to 1.34 × better resolution when compared with the full spherical 360 degree video stream. Further, when rate adaption is used, it ensures the QoE of end users evolves according to the changes in the network conditions. This means that our proposed rate and FoV adaptation based upon the network responsiveness achieves both the apprently contradictory goals of increasing the end-user QoE and reducing the overall bandwidth consumption at the network layer.