Tile-Based Joint Caching and Delivery of 360⁰ Videos in Heterogeneous Networks

The recent surge of applications involving the use of 360⁰ video challenges mobile networks infrastructure, as 360⁰ video files are of significant size, and current delivery and edge caching architectures are unable to guarantee their timely delivery. In this paper, we investigate the problem of joint collaborative content-aware caching and delivery of 360⁰ videos in a video on demand setting. The proposed scheme takes advantage of 360⁰ video encoding in multiple tiles and layers to make fine-grained decisions regarding which tiles to cache in each Small Base Station (SBS), and where to deliver them from to the end users, as users may reside in the coverage area of multiple SBSs. This permits to cache the most popular tiles in the SBSs, while the remaining tiles may be obtained through the backhaul. In addition, we explicitly consider the time delivery constraints to ensure continuous video playback. To reduce the computational complexity of the optimization problem, we simplify it by introducing a fairness constraint. This allows us to split the original problem into subproblems corresponding to Groups of Pictures (GoP). Each of the subproblems is then solved with the method of Lagrange partial relaxation. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed method for various system parameters and compare it with schemes that do not consider 360⁰ video encoding into multiple tiles and quality layers, as well as with two variants of the proposed method one that considers layered encoding and SBSs collaboration and another that uses tiles encoding but with no SBSs collaboration. The results showcase the benefits coming from caching and delivery decisions on per tile basis and the importance of exploiting SBSs collaboration.