View direction and bandwidth adaptive 360 degree video streaming using a two-tier system

360 degree video compression and delivery is one of the key components of virtual reality (VR) applications. In such applications, the users may freely control and navigate the captured 3D environment from any viewing direction. Given that only a small portion of the entire video is watched at any time, fetching the entire 360 degree raw video is therefore unnecessary and bandwidth-consuming. In this work, a novel two-tier 360 degree video streaming scheme is proposed to accommodate the dynamics in both network bandwidth and viewing direction. Based on the real-trace driven simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed framework can significantly outperform conventional 360 video streaming schemes.