Tile-Based Edge Caching for 360° Live Video Streaming

360 degrees video is becoming an increasingly popular technology on commercial social platforms and vital part of emerging Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality (VR/AR) applications. However, the delivery of 360 degrees video content in mobile networks is challenging because of its size. The encoding of 360 degrees video into multiple quality layers and tiles and edge cache-assisted video delivery have been proposed as a remedy to the excess bandwidth requirements of 360 degrees video delivery systems. Existing works using the above tools have shown promising performance for Video-on-Demand (VoD) 360 degrees delivery, but they cannot be straightforwardly extended in a live-streaming setup. Motivated by the above, we study edge cache-assisted 360 degrees live video streaming to increase the overall quality of the delivered 360 degrees videos to users and reduce the service cost. We employ Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to forecast the evolution of the content requests and prefetch content to caches. To further enhance the delivered video quality, users located in the overlap of the coverage areas of multiple Small Base Stations (SBSs) are allowed to receive data from any of these SBSs. We evaluate and compare the performance of our algorithm with Least Frequently Used (LFU), Least Recently Used (LRU), and First In First Out (FIFO) algorithms. The results show the superiority of the proposed approach in terms of delivered video quality, cache-hit-ratio and backhaul link usage.

Automated summary

The study focuses on edge cache-assisted 360 degrees live video streaming to improve video quality and reduce service costs. LSTM networks are used to predict content requests and prefetch content to caches, allowing users to receive data from multiple Small Base Stations. The proposed approach shows superior performance in terms of delivered video quality, cache-hit-ratio, and backhaul link usage compared to other algorithms.