A Multipath Routing Approach for Tile-based Virtual Reality Video Streaming Based on SDN
Fanyuan Zou, Yumei Wang, Yu Liu · 2021
With the increasing demand of virtual reality (VR) video applications, it is necessary to adopt corresponding strategies to deal with the challenges they bring to the network. Multipath routing is proposed to address the VR video bandwidth problem by splitting a large flow into multiple subflows and routing them separately. In addition, Software Defined Networking (SDN) is used to manage these subflows so that they are assigned to the appropriate paths. This paper presents a MCTS-based VR video multipath transmission approach (MVRMPT), which allocates better paths to the VR video tiles that have greater impacts on the user’s Quality of Experience (QoE). More specifically, the Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithm is modified to find multiple disjoint paths with the minimum delay between node pairs. Then the paths are sorted by the predicted QoE. Finally, the VR video is spatially divided into different zones, and these zones are assigned to different paths according to their impacts on the user’s QoE. The proposed algorithm is implemented in the SDN controller, and the evaluation results show that our method achieves higher QoE and network throughput.