Influence of MPEG-4 parameters on system energy

The impact of MPEG-4 video coding algorithms and their parameters on total energy (communication plus computation) is investigated. Specifically, the effect of the quantization parameter, number of B-frames, error-resilience techniques, content-based coding, and spatial and temporal scalability options are studied. Based on the simulation results, recommendations are made for the choice of these algorithms and their parameters such that total energy minimization is achieved. During this process, the residual battery energy of a mobile device and the state of the wireless link are also considered. We believe that the results and recommendations presented in this paper could be a useful step towards designing low power wireless multimedia networks that involve video transmission in general and employ MPEG-4 in particular.