An Energy Perspective of Multimedia Streaming Systems

The demand for multimedia streaming is growing at a phenomenal rate, and data-centre-empowered streaming services are becoming more common nowadays. To better accommodate the demand, the computing power and networking components in data centres are being upgraded regularly, leading to higher energy bills. Many studies have been conducted around reducing the power consumed by data centres, but very little attention has been paid to the data transmissions and the power consumed by the entire system, from the streaming source to the end-user devices. In this paper, we are interested in the power efficiency of multimedia streaming system as a whole. We take on the analysis in three directions: traffic imposed by different streaming protocols, underlay physical network structure, and the network infrastructure (data centre vs. Peer-to-Peer). Three main conclusions drawn from the study are: (1) very insignificant power savings can be achieved by tuning the streaming protocol, router connectivity, or the network infrastructure, (2) significant power savings can be achieved through reducing the idle power of routers and end-user devices, and (3) the energy efficiency of the end-user devices determines whether the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) infrastructure can be a green alternative for data-centre-empowered streaming.