CSR: Small: Energy-Aware and QoE-Aware Video Streaming on Mobile Devices

Video streaming on mobile devices has seen tremendous growth recently, and is a major marketing point of many wireless carriers. Because videos have very large data sizes, the mobile devices must spend a great deal of their battery power on downloading and processing the video over the wireless network. Existing research on video streaming over the Internet does not consider the new research challenges related to energy efficiency and the special characteristics of mobile devices and wireless networks. This project addresses these challenges by developing novel techniques to save energy while maintaining users' Quality of Experience (QoE) during video streaming.

To support energy-aware and QoE-aware video streaming on mobile devices, this research addresses the challenges of how, when and how much data to download under different contexts to save energy and improve users' QoE through the following thrusts: (a) understanding how the processor frequency affects network throughput and energy consumption, and how to adjust the frequency to minimize energy or maximize QoE considering user context; (b) development of protocols for buffer management considering that users skip scenes and abort watching under some circumstances; and (c) reducing the energy consumption of video streaming through network quality aware downloading and context-aware downloading.

As video streaming on mobile devices becomes part of everyday life, this research has great potential to benefit society by improving the quality of video streaming and making mobile devices last longer. The results from this research are likely to foster new research directions on supporting energy aware and QoE-aware video streaming on mobile devices. The project will engage under-represented students in research. The scholarly discovery of this project will be disseminated broadly through publications, open-source software, and summer camps.

All data produced as a result of this project, including trace data, software code, simulation data, and publications, will be made publicly available at the project repository: http://www.cse.psu.edu/~gcao/nsf/mobilevideo. The data and the resulting research outputs will be maintained using appropriate methods for at least five years after the end of the project.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.