A Hierarchical Update Buffer Management for 360-Degree Video Streaming

Virtual reality can provide users with immersive experience. However, because of its high requirement of bandwidth, it is still challenge to transmit 360-degree video. To overcome this issue, tile-based VR transmission strategy was proposed to reduce the data by dividing the 360-degree video into several tiles and streaming corresponding tiles according to user's viewport. While the prediction accuracy is only guaranteed in a short time and it may cause frequent rebuffering when the network fluctuates, two-tier buffer system was proposed to tackle this problem. Nevertheless the two-tier method doesn't consider the switching frequency of rate in user's viewport. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical update buffer management method by jointly considering the probability of rebuffering and the switching frequency of rate in FoV to improve user's QoE. The simulation results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms other methods in proving the smoothness of the viewing experience.