Transmission Protocol Customization for On-demand Tile-based 360° VR Video Streaming

Tile-based streaming has been proposed to address the challenge of high transmission rate demand in 360° virtual reality (VR) video streaming. However, it suffers from network condition dynamics and viewer field-of-view (FoV) prediction errors. In this paper, we propose a customized transmission protocol based on Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) which operates over a VR video core network slice to support enhanced slice-level VR video data transmission. The QUIC protocol is tailored to accommodate the characteristics of tile-based VR video streaming where explicit mapping relations between requested video tiles and QUIC streams are established. Two customized protocol functionalities including packet filtering and caching-based packet retransmission are proposed, which filter out outdated video data due to FoV prediction errors and achieve efficient packet loss recovery, respectively. A slice-level packet header is designed to support enhanced slice-based VR video packet transmissions with the proposed protocol functionalities. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed protocol.