Energy-efficient wireless video streaming with H.264 coding

Broadcasting multimedia content over a wireless channel from a base station to wireless devices is a challenging trade-off between the limited battery power of wireless devices and the quality expected by users. A further complication is that the data rate of a wireless channel changes over time. In this paper, we develop a Power-Rate-Buffer-Distortion optimization framework with the goal of minimizing the energy consumption of a wireless receiver subject to quality and data rate constraints. Our framework provides a method for selecting coding parameters, such as bit rate and intra refresh rate, in a way that minimizes the energy consumption of the receiver. Our simulation results show that our framework can reduce energy consumption by up to 50% compared to the conventional AVC video streaming method, depending on the required video quality.