Streaming 360° videos to head-mounted virtual reality using DASH over QUIC transport protocol

We design, implement, and evaluate a tiled DASH streaming system for 360° videos using QUIC/UDP protocol, in which multiplexed and prioritized streams are leveraged for sending urgent tiles that are about to miss their playout time. In particular, we develop a new architecture to concurrently request for regular tiled segments at a lower priority and urgent tiled segments at a higher priority as multiple streams over a single QUIC connection. Several core components, including the fixation prediction algorithm, fast tile selector, and Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) controller are designed for this new architecture. Our trace-driven experiments reveal that: (i) DASH streaming over the QUIC protocol outperforms doing that over the HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 stacks and (ii) our urgent tiled segments reduce the missing ratio and increase the video quality without incurring excessive bandwidth utilization under diverse network bandwidth, user behavior, and video characteristics.