Energy efficient video streaming over wireless networks with mobile-to-mobile cooperation

With the increasing trend for Internet-capable mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablet PCs, users create an explosion of media streaming traffic. Even though the current cellular networks are barely able to provide such service in tolerable data rates, it leads to significant energy consumption. Therefore, in this paper, a cooperative method is proposed to minimize the energy consumption of video data distribution. The mobile devices are divided into several clusters and only part of the video is transmitted to each cluster header by eNodeB through cell links. Then, the headers aggregate their content and transmit the whole content to their subordinate mobile devices by mobile-to-mobile links established via Wi-Fi. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.