This article proposes a novel energy-efficient multimedia delivery system called EStreamer. First, we study the relationship between buffer size at the client, burst-shaped TCP-based multimedia traffic, and energy consumption of wireless network interfaces in smartphones. Based on the study, we design and implement EStreamer for constant bit rate and rate-adaptive streaming. EStreamer can improve battery lifetime by 3x, 1.5x, and 2x while streaming over Wi-Fi, 3G, and 4G, respectively.
Wireless interfaces are major power consumers on mobile systems. Considerable research has improved the energy efficiency of elongated idle periods or created more elongated idle periods in wireless interfaces, often requiring cooperation from applications or the network infrastructure. With increasing wireless mobile data, it has become critical to improve the energy efficiency of active wireless interfaces. In this work, we present micro power management (μPM), a solution inspired by the mismatch between the high performance of state-of-the-art 802.11 interfaces and the modest data rate requirements by many popular network applications. μPM enables an 802.11 interface to enter unreachable power-saving modes even between MAC frames, without noticeable impact on the traffic flow. To control data loss, μPM leverages the retransmission mechanism in 802.11 and controls frame delay to adapt to demanded network throughput with minimal cooperation from the access point. Based on a theoretical framework, we employ simulation to systematically investigate an effective and efficient implementation of μPM. We have built a prototype μPM on an open-access wireless hardware platform. Measurements show that more than 30 power reduction for the wireless transceiver can be achieved with μPM for various applications without perceptible quality degradation. Multimedia streaming applications are among the most energy hungry applications in smartphones. The energy consumption mostly depends on the delivery techniques and on the power management techniques of wireless interfaces (Wi-Fi and 3G). In order to provide insights on what kind of streaming techniques exist, how they work on different mobile platforms, and what is their impact on the energy consumption of mobile phones, we have done a large set of active measurements with several smartphones having both Wi-Fi and cellular network access. Our analysis reveals five different techniques to deliver the content to the video players. The selection of a technique depends on the device, player, quality, and service. The results from our power measurements allow us to conclude that none of the identified techniques is optimal because they take none of the following facts into account: access technology used, user behaviour, and user preferences concerning data waste. However, we point out the techniques that provide the most attractive trade-offs in particular situations. Furthermore, we make several observations on the energy consumption of different players, containers, and video qualities that should be taken into consideration when optimizing the energy consumption. In mobile devices, the wireless network interface card (WNIC) consumes a significant portion of overall system energy. One way to reduce energy consumed by a device is to transition its WNIC to a lower-power steep mode when data is not being received or transmitted. In this paper, we investigate client-centered techniques for energy efficient communication, using IEEE 802.11b, within the network layer. The basic idea is to conserve energy by keeping the WNIC in high-power mode only when necessary. We track each connection, which allows us to determine inactive intervals during which to transition the WNIC to sleep mode. Whenever necessary, we also shape the traffic from the client side to maximize sleep intervals-convincing the server to send data in bursts. This trades lower WNIC energy consumption for an increase in transmission time. Our techniques are compatible with standard TCP and do not rely on any assistance from the server or network infrastructure. Results show that during Web browsing, our client-centered technique saved 21 percent energy compared to PSM and incurred less than a 1 percent increase in transmission time compared to regular TCP. For a large file download, our scheme saved 27 percent energy on average with a transmission time increase of only 20 percent While the 802.11 power saving mode (PSM) and its enhancements can reduce power consumption by putting the wireless network interface (WNI) into sleep as much as possible, they either require additional infrastructure support, or may degrade the transmission throughput and cause additional transmission delay. These schemes are not suitable for long and bulk data transmissions with strict QoS requirements on wireless devices. With increasingly abundant bandwidth available on the Internet, we have observed that TCP congestion control is often not a constraint of bulk data transmissions as bandwidth throttling is widely used in practice. In this paper, instead of further manipulating the trade-off between the power saving and the incurred delay, we effectively explore the power saving potential by considering the bandwidth throttling on streaming downloading servers. We propose an application-independent protocol, called PSM-throttling. With a quick detection on the TCP flow throughput, a client can identify bandwidth throttling connections with a low cost Since the throttling enables us to reshape the TCP traffic into periodic bursts with the same average throughput as the server transmission rate, the client can accurately predict the arriving time of packets and turn on off the WNI accordingly. PSM-throttling can minimize power consumption on TCP-based bulk traffic by effectively utilizing available Internet bandwidth without degrading the application's performance perceived by the user. Furthermore, PSM-throttling is client-centric, and does not need any additional infrastructure support. Our lab-environment and Internet-based evaluation results show that PSM-throttling can effectively improve energy savings (by up to 75 ) and or the QoS for a broad types of TCP-based applications, including streaming, pseudo streaming, and large file downloading, over existing PSM-like methods.