Dynamic stream control for energy efficient video streaming

Gartner predicts that by 2013 mobile devices will overtake PCs as the most popular type of device used for accessing Internet-based services. Meanwhile, mobile phones are becoming increasingly complex and powerful. However, battery technology has not been increasing at the same pace and hence, there is an urgent need for solutions to balance the battery performance of mobile devices and their functionality. An efficient solution would be to analyze the application(s) running on the device and manipulate all available device parameters, in order to maximize the power saving while minimizing the effect on the Quality of Service. As an initial step towards this unified solution, this paper takes an extremely important functionality as a starting point video streaming. Different mechanisms for adaptive multimedia streams in mobile devices are investigated. Furthermore, an enhanced version of the Battery and Stream Aware Adaptive Multimedia Delivery algorithm (BaSe-AMy) is tested on a real-world mobile device. The experiments result in an increase to the maximum playtime of a video stream of up to 10%, as compared to non-energy-aware streaming solutions, while also maintaining a high stream PSNR value.