Energy- and Thermal-Aware Video Coding via Encoder/Decoder Workload Balancing

Video coding and compression are essential components of multimedia services but are known to be computationally intensive and energy demanding. Traditional video coding paradigms, predictive and distributed video coding (PVC and DVC), result in excessive computation at either the encoder (PVC) or decoder (DVC). Several recent papers have proposed a hybrid PVC/DVC codec which shares the video coding workload between encoder and decoder. In this article, we propose a controller for such hybrid coders that considers energy and temperature to dynamically split the coding workload of a system comprised of one encoder and one decoder. We also present two heuristic algorithms for determining safe operating temperatures in the controller solution: (1) stable state thermal modeling algorithm, which focuses on long term temperatures, and (2) transient thermal modeling algorithm, which is better for short-term thermal behavior. Results show that the proposed algorithms result in more balanced energy utilization, improve overall system lifetime, and reduce operating temperatures when compared to strictly PVC and DVC systems.