eSMART: Energy-efficient Scalable Multimedia Broadcast for heterogeneous users

The reduction of energy consumption is a major concern in the current telecommunications environment - especially with the growth in usage of energy-hungry multimedia-centric applications on high-end mobile devices. In this context, this paper proposes eSMART, an Energy-efficient Scalable Multimedia Broadcast Transmission mechanism, that considers the energy-quality trade-off to reduce battery power consumption (increase energy saving) of heterogeneous mobile devices while maintaining acceptable perceived quality levels of received video. A real experimental test-bed has been built to analyze the impact of different multimedia scalability factors on the energy consumption of various mobile devices receiving broadcast content. Overall mobile device energy-saving is modeled using the accumulative effect of adaptive scalable video playback energy saving and time-sliced broadcast reception based radio-receiver´s energy saving. eSMART´s optimization framework performs user-centric adaptive encoding of scalable video that is broadcast to heterogeneous user equipments. eSMART serves more users at improved quality of experience levels and achieves up to 69% increase in mobile device energy savings as compared to a non-adaptive time-slicing scheme from the literature.