Overlay collaboration towards reduced bandwidth costs in multi-view streaming

Delivering high-quality multiview video (MV) through Internet is very challenging due to its excessive consumption on server bandwidth resources. Existing solutions encode video contents independently for each view and deliver them separately in isolated view channels, without leveraging the features of MV and taking advantage of multiview video coding(MVC). To minimize the server bandwidth costs, we introduce a novel overlay collaboration framework that unifies all view channels to cooperate in delivering MV: I pictures in MVC are shared among them instead of requesting from server respectively; Surplus resources of hotspot view channels are effectively utilized to help channels with insufficient resources, both of which contribute to remarkable reduction in server bandwidth costs. Simulation experiments show that our method achieves more than 40% reduced bandwidth costs on server while maintaining scalability and resilience to user dynamics.