A Media-Aware Transmission Framework for 3D-HEVC Over LTE Networks

The demand for high quality mobile video is driving advancement on many new technologies, from 4K to HDR to 3D. Content producers have begun creating high quality 3D video as well as building infrastructure for live streaming of stereoscopic 3D. When viewing live 3D video on a mobile device transmitted over a wireless network (such as LTE), network congestion and interference can lead to packet loss. The 3D viewing experience can be severely impacted by lost data, so it is vital to have a rate adaptation method for graceful degradation. We propose a combined system composed of a packet prioritization method for transmission and an error concealment strategy for viewing 3D-HEVC encoded video transmitted over an LTE network. This system improves the quality of experience by prioritizing packets with higher quality impact based on the number of dependent packets, leading to a superior PSNR and reduced playback freezes. This media-aware transmission approach is evaluated using the Vienna LTE-A Simulator; results show that it outperforms media-agnostic transmission from light to heavy network load with stringent startup delays. The evaluation demonstrates the utility of media-aware 3D-HEVC transmission and provides motivation for future media-aware developments in multi-view plus depth transmission.