Channel-Aware Rate Adaptation for Energy Optimization and Congestion Avoidance

Achieving low energy consumption is one of the main challenges for wireless video transmission on battery limited devices. Moreover, the bandwidth is scarce and needs to be properly shared amongst different users. Congestion in the network can result in packet losses, with a significant impact on video quality. In this paper we propose the use of a channel-adaptive rate control mechanism in a multi-user WLAN up-link scenario. The benefit is twofold: the communication energy is reduced and congestion is strongly alleviated allowing an increase of the video quality or a network capacity increase for a similar quality.