On tile assignment for region-of-interest video streaming in a wireless LAN

Abstract

We consider the following problem in this paper: A video is encoded as a set of tiles T and is streamed to multiple users via a one-hop wireless LAN. Each user selects a region-of-interest (RoI), represented as a subset of T, in the video to watch. The RoI selected by the users may overlap. Each tile may be multicast or unicast. We define the tile assignment problem as: which subset of tiles should be multicast such that every user receives, within a transmission deadline, the subset of tiles pertaining to the RoI the user selected, while minimizing the number of unwanted tiles received by users. We present and evaluate five tile assignment methods. We show that: (i) minimizing transmission delay can lead to significant wasteful reception in the multicast group, (ii) using tile access probability to assign tiles frequently leads to assignments that violate the deadline, and (iii) a fast, greedy, heuristic works well: it performs close to the optimal method and can always find an assignment within the deadline (as long as such assignment exists). © 2012 ACM.