Tile caching for scalable VR video streaming over 5G mobile networks

Abstract

Currently, VR video delivery over 5G systems is still a very complicated endeavor. One of the major challenges for VR video streaming is the expectations for low latency that current mobile networks can hardly meet. Network caching can reduce the content delivery latency efficiently. However, current caching schemes cannot obtain ideal results for VR video since it requests the viewport interactively. In this paper, we propose a tiled scalable VR video caching scheme over 5G networks. VR chunks are first encoded into multi-granularity quality layers, and are then partitioned into tiles to facilitate viewport data access. By accommodating the 5G network infrastructure, the tiles are cooperatively cached in a three-level hierarchal system to reduce delivery latency. Furthermore, a quality-adaptive request routing algorithm is designed to cater for the 5G bandwidth dynamics. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can reduce the transmission latency over conventional constant bitrate video caching schemes. © 2021 Elsevier Inc.