TVSR-OR: Tile-based 360-degree video streaming over real time streaming protocol with optimized read

Among video application use cases and scenarios, 360-degree video applications gradually become significant. The state-of-the-art solution for 360-degree video streaming is field of view (FOV) transmission, whose quality of experience highly depends on system processing speed and network latency. The extant 360-degree video FOV transmission profiles transmit multiple video tile streams to the client over either Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP). The client needs to merge all different tile streams after receiving them, which may cause a data synchronization problem of waiting for each tile to sync in the presents of packet losses. Therefore, we propose a system to select and merge tile streams on the Content Delivery Network (CDN) server and transmit the merged stream to the client. During the streaming service, the client can send a viewport switch request through RTSP signaling, and the server will subsequently deliver the merged video stream of the new viewport to the client after receiving the request. Also, to reduce disk overhead from parallel reads, we optimize the system with a file prefetch strategy to reduce unorganized, random, and parallel reads into serialized reads of large data trunks. We evaluate its performance through user request simulation experiments. Compared with the extant transmission solution, our system provides slightly lower video transmission latency, lower central processing unit (CPU) usage, and better disk performance under heavy service load.