SRA360: Super-Resolution Enhanced Adaptive 360-Degree Video Streaming for Heterogeneous Viewers

As a driving force behind Virtual Reality (VR), 360-degree video streaming enables immersive and interactive experiences that seamlessly connect the physical and digital worlds. However, their bandwidth-intensive nature poses substantial challenges to existing systems. To address the high bandwidth demand associated with streaming 360-degree videos, some researchers have proposed super-resolution technology enhanced video streaming systems. However, these solutions often face challenges in uniformly applying to diverse user devices, which exhibit significant variations in bandwidth and computational capabilities. This paper introduces SRA360, an innovative super-resolution enhanced adaptive 360-degree video streaming scheme for heterogeneous viewers. It integrates server, edge, and client layers, utilizing a Meta Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm for adaptive video quality selection and computational task scheduling in heterogeneous environments. Then a Reconstruction and Retransmission enabled Double Buffer mechanism is proposed to solve the conflict of smooth playback and high-precision FoV prediction. Real-world trace-driven experiment results demonstrate the superiority of SRA360 in enhancing quality of experience and reducing bandwidth consumption compared to state-of-art methods.