Mobile Edge Assisted Live Streaming System for Omnidirectional Video

As a popular form of virtual reality (VR) media, omnidirectional video (OV) has been continuously developed in recent years. OV contains the view of the scene in every direction, which will ask for around 120 Mbps with 8k resolution and 25 fps (frames per second). Although there has been a lot of work to optimize the transmission for on-demand of OV, the research on the live streaming of OV is still very lacking. Another big challenge for the OV live streaming system is the huge demand for computing resources. The existing terminal devices are difficult to completely carry tasks such as stitching, encoding, and rendering. This paper proposes a mobile edge assisted live streaming system for omnidirectional video (MELiveOV); the MELiveOV can intelligently offload the processing tasks to the edge computing enabled 5G base stations. The MELiveOV consists of an omnidirectional video generation module, a streaming module, and a viewpoint prediction module. A prototype system of MELiveOV is implemented to prove its complete end-to-end OV live streaming service. Evaluation result demonstrates that compared with the traditional solution, MELiveOV can reduce the network bandwidth requirement by about 50% and the transmission delay of more than 70% while ensuring the quality of the user’s experience.