ECO-M: Energy-efficient Cluster-Oriented Multimedia delivery in a LTE D2D environment

The rapid advances in technology lead to a mass-market adoption of the multi-radio high-end smartphone devices and an exponential increase in the mobile broadband data traffic. In the search for a solution to cope with this explosion of data traffic, Device-to-Device (D2D) communications become an attractive approach for enhancing the performance of cellular networks. The emerging of WiFi Direct framework introduced new opportunities for mobile-to-mobile opportunistic offloading. In this context, this paper proposes ECO-M, an Energy-efficient Cluster-Oriented solution for Multimedia delivery in a LTE D2D environment using WiFi Direct. Experimental test-bed measurements and numerical results show the efficiency of such a solution in terms of energy efficiency, battery discharge and battery lifetime when compared with a standard LTE environment. Subjective tests were carried out to study not only the impact of user perceived quality on the various multimedia quality levels choices but also the impact of user preferences in terms of energy conservation versus multimedia quality.