Energy benefit of distributed in-network processing for personalized media service delivery

In-network processing of media streams will be necessary in order to meet the personalization, interactive, and real time requirements of future video centric media services. Using multi-view video (MVV) streaming as an example, we investigate the energy tradeoff between video processing and transport for the delivery of personalized media services. We focus on evaluating the energy benefit of distributed vs. centralized processing architectures. We provide solutions for the relative energy efficiency regions as a function of the user viewing preferences and the processing-transport efficiency ratio. Our results show that a small number of requests and a homogeneous interest among viewing regions favors the centralized processing of personalized video streams and multicast transport to end users, while a larger number of requests and a heterogeneous interest favors the processing of personalized views at a distributed subset of nodes in the network.