Energy Efficient Multimedia Streaming to Mobile Devices — A Survey

TLDR

Energy conservation in battery‑powered mobile devices that stream multimedia wirelessly has been a major research problem for the past decade because these devices consume large amounts of power during reception, decoding, and display, and battery technology has not kept pace with device advances. This survey reviews solutions proposed over the last few years to improve the energy efficiency of wireless multimedia streaming on handheld mobile devices. The authors classify the work by Internet protocol stack layer and by traffic‑scheduling or content‑adaptation techniques, noting that scheduling methods reduce receiver energy without altering content while adaptation methods modify the content to lower energy for reception, decoding, and viewing, and they also contrast these with energy‑aware delivery from mobile devices. The survey demonstrates that several of these tactics are already implemented in modern smartphones and achieve measurable energy savings.

Abstract

Energy conservation in battery powered mobile devices that perform wireless multimedia streaming has been a significant research problem since last decade. This is because these mobile devices consume a lot of power while receiving, decoding and ultimately, presenting the multimedia content. What makes things worse is the fact that battery technologies have not evolved enough to keep up with the rapid advancement of mobile devices. This survey examines solutions that have been proposed during the last few years, to improve the energy efficiency of wireless multimedia streaming in mobile hand-held devices. We categorize the research work according to different layers of the Internet protocol stack they utilize. Then, we again regroup these studies based on different traffic scheduling and multimedia content adaptation mechanisms. The traffic scheduling category contains those solutions that optimize the wireless receiving energy without changing the actual multimedia content. The second category on the other hand, specifically modifies the content, in order to reduce the energy consumed by the wireless receiver and to decode and view the content. We compare them and provide evidence of the fact that some of these tactics already exist in modern smaprtphones and provide energy savings with real measurements. In addition, we discuss some relevant literature on the complementary problem of energy-aware multimedia delivery from mobile devices and contrast with our target approaches for multimedia transmission to mobile devices.