Utility-oriented resource allocation for 360-degree video transmission over heterogeneous networks

Immersive media streaming, especially virtual reality (VR)/360-degree video streaming which is very bandwidth demanding, has become more and more popular due to the rapid growth of the multimedia and networking deployments. To better explore the usage of resource and achieve better video quality perceived by users, this paper develops an application-layer scheme to jointly exploit the available bandwidth from the LTE and Wi-Fi networks in 360-degree video streaming. This newly proposed scheme explores the saliency of video contents, prediction of users' view and channel status information to maximize the system's utility in a multi-RAN environment. It also determines the optimal association of users with multiple Wi-Fi access points (APs). Besides, a novel buffer strategy is proposed to mitigate the influence of short-time prediction problem for transmitting 360-degree videos in time-varying networks. The promising performance and low complexity of the proposed scheme and algorithms are validated in simulations with various 360-degree videos.