JET: Joint source and channel coding for error resilient virtual reality video wireless transmission

Abstract Virtual reality (VR) provides users extraordinary viewing experience and draws more and more attentions from both industry and academia. In this paper, we propose JET: Joint source and channel coding for Error resilient virtual reality video wireless Transmission, where we jointly investigate how to conquer the problem of source video’s huge size, how to efficiently satisfy a user’s view switch request and how to handle packet loss. Specifically, we first divide a VR video into smaller video tiles. Upon a user’s view switch request, the tiles corresponding to the part that the user is requesting, referred to as the field of view (FoV), and the part that the user may switch to before new video can be received, are delivered over a wireless network. We consider unequal error protection (UEP) for FoV and the rest part and formulate the inherent error resilient VR video transmission problem into a joint source and channel coding problem. In particular, we optimize the tile partition, quantization parameter and Forward Error Correction (FEC) packet allocation to maximize a user’s received video quality. We also propose a low-complexity heuristic algorithm to solve this optimization problem. Extensive simulations are conducted and simulation results verify the superior performance.