EC-360: Speeding Up 360° Video Streaming Using Tile-based Online Erasure Coding

Jianxin Shi, Lingjun Pu, Tian Zhang, Jingdong Xu

Abstract: 360° video services require extremely high bitrate and frame rate videos for a good immersive experience. Traditional solutions for adaptive bitrate streaming are still limited by currently insufficient and fluctuating bandwidth. Besides, viewpoint-aware or tile-based solutions would lead more rebuffering due to the short viewpoint prediction window. In this paper, we present EC-360, a novel video streaming framework to speed up 360° video streaming. Specifically, it creatively integrates tilebased online erasure coding into multi-source content delivery to mitigate “cask effect” or impact of straggler node, which oftentimes leads to failure to improve delivery speed in multisource streaming. We formulate the critical tile-based request scheduling problem in EC-360 based on the Combinatorial Multiarmed Bandit (CMAB) model and develop a low complexity online algorithm. We further theoretically verify the efficiency of the CMAB-based algorithm by deriving its regret upper bound. Extensive experiments based on prototype implementation and real network traces corroborate the efficiency, flexibility, and lightweight of proposed solution. EC-360 achieves superior performance improvement compared to state-of-the-art works in various network scenes and system settings.