An energy‐efficient protocol for multimedia streaming in a mobile environment

Abstract

Pervasive services and smart environments are becoming\nmore and more popular as an ever-increasing number\nof people enjoys these services typically by means of portable\ndevices. These devices are battery-fed and, thus, energy efficiency\nis a critical factor for the deployment of pervasive services.\nIn this paper we focus on multimedia streaming services for\nmobile users. Specifically, we consider a scenario where mobile\nusers with Wi-Fi devices access the Internet to receive audio\nfiles from a remote streaming server. We propose a proxybased\narchitecture and an energy-efficient streaming protocol\nthat minimize the energy consumption of the Wi-Fi interface at\nthe mobile device, while guaranteeing the real-time constraints\nof the audio streaming. The experimental analysis performed on\na prototype implementation shows that our solution allows an\nenergy saving ranging from 76%to 91%of the total consumption\ndue to the network interface. Moreover, it also preserves a good\nuser-level Quality of Service.