Multi-Session Multicasting for 360-Degree Video Multicast over OFDMA Systems

Abstract

360-degree video content provides a rich and immersive multimedia experience to viewers by allowing viewers to the video from any angle. However, 360-degree videos require much higher bandwidth to be delivered over mobile networks compared to conventional videos. Multicasting of the videos is one of the solutions to efficiently utilize the limited bandwidth since many viewers share the wireless spectrum resource for popular videos, such as sports events or musical concerts. LTE eMBMS assigns the videos to the video sessions, and multiple viewers can subscribe to the same video allocated to the video sessions. Moreover, the tiling of the 360-degree video makes it possible to control the regional quality of the video. The tiles that are likely to be seen by many viewers should have higher quality than other tiles to satisfy more viewers. In this paper, we proposed the Multi-Session Multicast (MSM) system to optimally allocate the wireless resources to tiles with different qualities to maximize the expected user experience. The experimental results show that the proposed MSM system provides higher quality videos to viewers using limited wireless resources.