QoE-aware 360-degree Video Streaming for Autonomous Vehicles

360-degree video streaming has gained significant popularity and has been employed in a variety of autonomous driving scenarios such as road traffic awareness and interactions between autonomous vehicles and pedestrians. However, maintaining an appropriate buffer size poses a major challenge for smooth playback and a high Quality of Experience (QoE). In this paper, we propose an adaptive buffer management scheme (BMQoE) that dynamically computes the optimal video bitrate based on the current buffer occupancy and available bandwidth. The proposed BMQoE scheme aims to improve QoE and bandwidth utilization by considering the client-side field of interest, bandwidth conditions, and buffer sizes. Experimental results show that the BMQoE scheme significantly reduces the duration of video stalls and improves the QoE of 360-degree video streaming by 16.7%, which is crucial for autonomous vehicles.