Dante: Enabling FOV-Aware Adaptive FEC Coding for 360-Degree Video Streaming.

As 360-degree videos grow dramatically in popularity, more applications demand the ability to stream 360-degree videos to wirelessly connected devices, such as smartphone headsets. However, the limited capacity and the unstable network conditions make wireless networks ill-suited to the requirements of 360-degree videos--high resolution and low delay. One common approach is to take advantage of the fact that the viewer only watches a small portion of the video around the field of view (FOV). This allows for better allocation of network bandwidth by prioritizing content the viewer actually watches. Previous efforts on 360-degree videos have largely focused on adapting the encoded bitrate to optimize video quality in the time-varying FOV. This paper follows the general FOV-aware approach but uses a different technique. Rather than adapting bitrate, we explore the opportunities of a custom underlying transport protocol for 360-degree videos. In particular, we make a case for using Forward Error Correction (FEC) coding over UDP to reduce video streaming delay (a key limitation of all TCP-based approaches). We present Dante, an FOV-aware UDP-based video streaming protocol that adapts to changing network conditions by dynamically choosing FEC redundancy levels based on how close the video content is to the FOV region. Experimental results show that Dante improves video quality (PSNR) by 20% to 30% over traditional UDP-based video streaming protocols and 40% over FOV-aware DASH.