Battery and Stream-Aware Adaptive Multimedia Delivery for wireless devices

Over the last number of years, smart mobile devices have been rapidly replacing computers as the most commonly-used web-access devices. Mobile device capabilities have improved exponentially with time, when compared with the relatively small increase in their battery life. This has had a serious impact on these devices' practical use, especially for multimedia streaming and video-on-demand applications. This paper proposes a cross-layer Battery and Stream-Aware Adaptive Multimedia Delivery mechanism (BaSe-AMy) that monitors mobile device remaining battery level, remaining video stream duration and packet loss rate. BaSe-AMy makes use of these values to decide whether or not video quality adaptation is required in order to achieve power saving, while also maintaining good user perceived Quality of Service (QoS) levels. The proposed mechanism is evaluated and compared with a non-adaptive scheme in terms of battery duration and video quality (expressed in terms of Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio — PSNR). It is shown that such a mechanism not only results in an increase in battery life by up to 18%, but also raises the video quality by up to 4%.