Power saving in hand-held multimedia systems using MPEG-21 digital item adaptation

The MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework initiative aims to support a wide range of networks and devices in the delivery and consumption of multimedia resources. One of the primary goals of MPEG-21 is universal multimedia access (UMA) through Digital Item Adaptation (DIA), which supports multimedia streaming to heterogeneous terminal devices ensuring the same readability and seamlessness. We pioneer power saving of terminal devices with MPEG-21 DIA, so that the MPEG-21 DIA can also be used to support power saving, even though the framework is not primarily designed for power reduction and only limited power awareness is defined by DIA. We introduce several power-saving techniques conforming to MPEG-21 DIA specifications and show the dependency relation among introduced techniques. We achieve energy savings of up to 66% in hand-held multimedia devices with minor QoS (Quality of Service) degradation.