Adaptive 360-Degree Video Streaming using Scalable Video Coding
Afshin Taghavi Nasrabadi, Anahita Mahzari, Joseph D. Beshay, Ravi Prakash · 2017
Virtual reality and 360-degree video streaming are growing rapidly, yet, streaming high-quality 360-degree video is still challenging due to high bandwidth requirements. Existing solutions reduce bandwidth consumption by streaming high-quality video only for the user's viewport. However, adding the spatial domain (viewport) to the video adaptation space prevents the existing solutions from buffering future video chunks for a duration longer than the interval that user's viewport is predictable. This makes playback more prone to video freezes due to rebuffering, which severely degrades the user's Quality of Experience especially under challenging network conditions. We propose a new method that alleviates the restrictions on buffer duration by utilizing scalable video coding. Our method significantly reduces the occurrence of rebuffering on links with varying bandwidth without compromising playback quality or bandwidth efficiency compared to the existing solutions. We demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed method using experimental results with real world cellular network bandwidth traces.