Tile-Based Joint Caching and Delivery of 360° Videos in Heterogeneous Networks

The recent surge of applications involving the use of 360° video challenges mobile networks infrastructure, as 360° 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 360° videos. The proposed scheme takes advantage of 360° video encoding in multiple tiles and layers to make fine-grained decisions regarding which tiles to cache in each Small Base Station (SBS), and from where to deliver them 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 decoupled into their caching and routing components and 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 360° video encoding into multiple tiles and quality layers. The results make clear the benefits coming from caching and delivery decisions on per tile basis.