360Cast: Foveation-Based Wireless Soft Delivery for 360-Degree Video

Wireless 360-degree video delivery provides virtual reality (VR) immersive experience where each user can freely switch his/her viewing orientation. The existing schemes of the wireless 360-degree video streaming use digital-based compression and transmission. However, they have many disadvantages in terms of video traffic and quality: cliff effect due to unstable wireless channels, large video traffic due to the extremely high resolution of the 360-degree video, and the perceptual redundancy within the transmitted video. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes a novel wireless 360-degree video transmission scheme called 360Cast. 360Cast adopts the analog-based transmission, including power allocation and analog modulation, to achieve graceful video quality improvement even in time-varying wireless channels. Here, the power allocation considers the distortion of human perception and sphere-to-plane projection to maximize the human perceptual quality at the 360-degree video playback. In addition, 360Cast predicts and transmits the user’s viewport based on the recent HMD user’s orientation by using dynamic linear regression (DLR) and only transmits the viewport for traffic reduction. Evaluation results show that the proposed 360Cast provides better human perceptual quality via HMD compared with the existing analog transmission schemes, i.e., SoftCast and FoveaCast, by using the integration of viewport prediction, power allocation, and analog modulation.