FedLive: A Federated Transmission Framework for Panoramic Livecast With Reinforced Variational Inference

Abstract

Providing premium panoramic livecast services to worldwide viewers considering their ultra-high data rate and delay-sensitivity is a significant challenge in the current network delivery environment. Therefore, it is important to design an efficient way of improving viewer quality of experience while conserving bandwidth resources. In this context, this paper introduces a novel cost-efficient federated transmission framework called <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">FedLive</i> and a set of algorithms to support it. First a gradient-based clustering method is proposed to group the geo-distributed viewers with similar viewing behavior into content delivery alliances by exploiting the geometric properties of the gradient loss. Next, a <underline xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">R</u> einforced <underline xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">V</u> ariational <underline xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">I</u> nference (RVI) structure-based approach is proposed to assist with the collaborative training of the viewer field of view (FoV) prediction model while also accelerating the tile delivery process. A novel prediction-based asynchronous delivery algorithm is designed in which both the high accuracy FoV prediction and efficient live 360 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^\circ$</tex-math></inline-formula> video transmission are achieved in a decentralized manner. FedLive was implemented for testing and an open source code is made available. Finally, the proposed solution was evaluated against a benchmark and three alternative state-of-the-art solutions using a real-world dataset. The experimental results show that our approach provides the highest prediction accuracy, better service performance, and saves bandwidth when compared with the other solutions.