Spatial Privacy-aware VR streaming

TL;DR

This paper introduces a privacy protection method for proactive VR streaming that balances user privacy with quality of experience by camouflaging tile requests and optimizing resource allocation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel spatial privacy model (sDoP) and a joint optimization framework to enhance privacy while maintaining QoE in VR streaming.

Findings

Increasing sDoP can improve communication and computing efficiency.

Higher sDoP may reduce prediction accuracy, impacting QoE.

Simulation results show overall QoE improvement with increased sDoP.

Abstract

Proactive tile-based virtual reality (VR) video streaming employs the current tracking data of a user to predict future requested tiles, then renders and delivers the predicted tiles before playback. Very recently, privacy protection in proactive VR video streaming starts to raise concerns. However, existing privacy protection may fail even with privacy-preserve federated learning. This is because when the future requested tiles can be predicted accurately, the user-behavior-related data can still be recovered from the predicted tiles. In this paper, we consider how to protect privacy even with accurate predictors and investigate the impact of privacy requirement on the quality of experience (QoE). To this end, we first add extra \textit{camouflaged} tile requests to the real tile requests and model the privacy requirement as the \textit{spatial degree of privacy} (sDoP). By ensuring sDoP, the real tile requests can be hidden and privacy can be protected. Then, we jointly optimize the durations for prediction, computing, and transmitting, aimed at maximizing the privacy-aware QoE given arbitrary predictor and configured resources. From the obtained optimal closed-form solution, we find that the impacts of sDoP on the QoE are two sides of the same coin. On the one side the increase of sDoP improves the capability of communication and computing hence improves QoE. On the other side it degrades the prediction performance hence degrades the QoE. The overall impact depends on which factor dominates the QoE. Simulation with two predictors on a real dataset verifies the analysis and shows that the overall impact of sDoP is to improve the QoE.