Muster: Multi-Source Streaming for Tile-Based 360° Videos Within Cloud Native 5G Networks

360$^\circ$ videos generally require a large amount of bandwidth between video servers and users, which puts much burden on the current CDN-based single-source video streaming solutions. The emerging cloud native 5G networks can bridge the distance between video servers and users by leveraging in-network single-source video streaming to enhance 360$^\circ$ video quality. Unfortunately, the restricted bandwidth of in-network servers becomes the main bottleneck. Although tile-based video streaming is promising to reduce video transmission size while keeping user QoE, it highly depends on the accuracy of user FoV prediction, which existing prediction methods cannot guarantee. Recently, some researchers advocate the idea of “super FoV” (i.e., an extended range of predicted FoV) to cope with the inaccurate FoV prediction, which however could lower the effect of tile-based video streaming. Alternatively, we present ${{\sf Muster}}$, a multi-source streaming for tile-based 360$^\circ$ videos within cloud native 5G networks. We detail the system components, provide a comprehensive model, formulate joint server selection and tile requesting problems, and correspondingly propose efficient online algorithms with a performance guarantee. Small-scale testbed and large-scale simulation based evaluation confirm the superiority of the proposed algorithms.

1 Introduction

360° videos, also known as panoramic videos, can provide users with an immersible viewing experience, becoming increasingly popular on many video platforms. In general, 360\$^\circ\$ videos have a large file size since they are of high resolution, frame rate, and dynamic range. For example, as to High-Definition (HD) 360\$^\circ\$ videos, the resolution of user Field of View (FoV) is 4K, and that of the whole 2D plane video is 12K [1]. In this context, an extremely high downstream bandwidth (e.g., a few hundred Mbps) is required to facilitate 360\$^\circ\$ video streaming [2]. However, suffering from the bandwidth limitation and fluctuation of backbone network, the current CDN-based single-source video streaming paradigm is unsatisfactory. Therefore, it is significant to explore innovative streaming architectures and technologies.