Ultra-Low Latency, Stable, and Scalable Video Transmission for Free-Viewpoint Video Services

Abstract

With IT and video technologies evolving rapidly, video services with user interaction emerge, and bring about attracting experiences. The growing bandwidth and latency demands call for advanced transmission techniques which utilize wired, wireless, and 5G cellular network, and cooperate unicast, multicast, and broadcast. Free-viewpoint video, as one of the interactive video applications, can provide users with immersion of real world scenes, and shows potential to be an essential application in future digital life. However, such an application is different from other video services in aspects of computation and communication features, and existing researches are not up to the low frame latency, smooth playback, and high service scalability challenges. In this paper, we target on the above problems, and achieve ultra-low latency and stable video transmission for free-viewpoint video services by improving the performance of multiple system components accordingly. Firstly, the key performance indicator is formulated for such services, and an edge computing based video transmission schema is proposed to achieve ultra-low frame latency. Secondly, a pair of stabilization algorithms at both server and client sides based on application features are introduced to ensure stable encoded video streams before transmission, and smooth playback after that. Thirdly, a cloud-edge-client hybrid free-viewpoint service architecture is proposed, which can provide hierarchical experiences and enlarge the service scale with restricted resources. Experimental results prove the effectiveness of the proposed transmission schema and scheduling algorithms, and feasibility of the proposed service architecture is revealed by qualitative analyses.