DASH and DASH⁃VR Video Multicast Systems

[Abstract] Multimedia data traffic occupies more than 70% of the Internet traffic and is still growing. On⁃demand video is already a major video content platform and private broadcast is getting more popular. In addition to this, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) data traffic is increasing very fast. To provide the good quality of the multimedia service, huge amount of resource is needed because users’ service experience is usually proportional to the video rates they can receive. Moreover, the variation of the bandwidth also affects to the users’ experience, while more users want to use their mobile devices to see multimedia data by accessing the network through wireless links, such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) and Wi⁃Fi. Therefore, better spectral efficiency during wireless transmission and video rate adaptation to provide better quality to users are in great demand. Multicast system is one of the technologies that can improve the spectral efficiency drastically, and Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) is one of the most popular video rate adaptation platforms. In this paper, we investigate the state⁃of⁃the⁃art video multicast technologies. LTE supports the multicast service through evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS) systems, and there are different algorithms to perform the video multicast along with adaptive video quality control. The algorithms include the procedure to decide the video rates, resource allocations, and user groupings. Moreover, we propose a novel approach to improve the quality of experience for DASH⁃VR video multicast systems.

[Keywords] VR; video multicast; LTE; eMBMS