Point Cloud Video Streaming in 5G Systems and Beyond: Challenges and Solutions

Volumetric media (or hologram video), the medium for representing natural content in VR/AR/MR, is presumably the next generation of video technology and a typical use case for 5G and beyond wireless communications. To realize volumetric media applications, efficient volumetric media streaming methods are in critical demand. To this end, this article studies the challenges for and solutions to wireless transmission systems of point cloud video, which is the most popular and favored way to represent volumetric media and significantly differs from the other types of videos. In particular, we first discuss point cloud video technology and its applications and then the challenges of and solutions to point cloud video streaming in 5G systems and beyond, including encoding, tiling, viewing angle prediction, decoding, quality assessment and transmission optimization. A prototype of DASH-based point cloud video streaming system is introduced as a preliminary study, along with more simulation results to verify the performance of the proposed scheme. Moreover, future research directions are identified for providing high-quality point cloud video streaming.