Xavier Corbillon and Gwendal Simon laureates of the prestigious IEEE ICC conference's Best Paper Award.

Last May, Xavier Corbillon, a doctoral student, and Gwendal Simon, a research lecturer for the Adopnet team (photo below) received the "Best Paper Award" at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), which is a major reference in the field of networks and communications. At the 26th edition of this conference, which was held in Paris from May 21-25 2017 and during which some 2000 researchers were gathered, the two authors had the satisfaction of seeing their innovative work on the delivery of multimedia content receive the Best Paper Award and therefore given particular prominence. A Best Paper Award highlights the quality of this contribution to science in comparison to all the other papers which were presented at the conference. When a Best Paper Award is presented at a prestigious conference which receives over 2500 submissions from more than 1500 world experts, it shows that this particular paper's contribution to science has the potential for a great impact on a wide community.

The “Viewport-Adaptive Navigable 360-Degree Video Delivery” paper presents a new approach for delivering 360° videos or virtual reality. The streaming of these videos is a challenge for Internet giants - for a user to fully benefit from the immersive experience, not only is  a good quality, high resolution image (4K visible, or 16K for the entire scene) necessary, but it must also be possible to react extremely quickly to head movements (10ms reaction times). These requirements can only be met by using a bandwidth far beyond that which current networks can provide (over 300 MB per second). It is therefore necessary to provide personalised solutions while keeping to reasonable delivery costs for a large population.

Xavier Corbillon (recipient of an excellence grant from IMT) and Gwendal Simon, in collaboration with Alisa Devlic (former post-doctoral student in the SRCD department and currently researcher for Huawei, Stockholm) and Jacob Chakareski (research lecturer at the University of Alabama), presented an original device which consists in offering users ten different versions of the same video, each one being characterised by a "region" in which the quality of the video is superior. In addition to this proposal, the authors presented a theoretical model allowing service providers to choose the "regions" to be highlighted and determine the number of optimal versions to maximise the Quality of Experience (QoE) for users within the network limits. Xavier Corbillon and Gwendal Simon also demonstrated the performance of their proposal, showing that quality increases of over 60% are possible.

This proposal is part of scientific advances which will soon allow everyone to experience virtual worlds, visit places remotely and direct critical operations (telemedicine, emergencies) without using transport. The two researchers are committed to academic research in order to fundamentally understand the limits of immersion in synthetic multimedia worlds. They also maintain close relationships with businesses in the field, particularly through adhering to standards. This Best Paper Award obtained at the IEEE ICC serves to strengthen the visibility and scientific credibility of their work.