Live360: Viewport-Aware Transmission Optimization in Live 360-Degree Video Streaming

Live 360-degree video streaming is emerging as the next disruptive innovation in the coming era. However, compared to conventional live video streaming, it is much more challenging to provide high-quality live 360-degree video streaming due to high bandwidth demand, stringent latency requirement, and diverse user viewports. In this paper, we propose a viewport-aware live 360-degree video streaming framework called Live360 to optimize end-to-end video stream transmission. To make the problem tractable, we decompose the transmission optimization problem into two sub-problems, and optimize upstream and downstream transmission in an asynchronous way. We prioritize 360-degree cameras according to users’ real-time viewing interests and upload attractive contents with a higher bitrate. We also re-define the metric of QoE (Quality-of-Experience) for live 360-degree video viewers, and solve the optimization problems efficiently using dynamic programming. Extensive experiments show that Live360 is lightweight and significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of various QoE metrics. The average QoE of Live360 is twice that of other baseline methods.