Towards Energy Efficient Multimedia Streaming to Mobile Devices

The rapid development in mobile and telecommunication industries together pushed up the popularity of multimedia streaming applications among the smartphone users. The streaming applications in smartphones heavily depend on wireless networking activities as a substantial amount of data is transmitted from a server to the streaming clients. Because of the very high energy requirement of wireless network interfaces, multimedia streaming applications are considered as the most energy hungry applications. Therefore, improving battery life time of the smartphones is essential while experiencing multimedia streaming. In this thesis, we investigate the energy consumption of modern mobile devices while experiencing multimedia from different video services and propose two energy efficient streaming techniques to reduce energy consumption of the smartphones when receiving multimedia content via Wi-Fi, 3G or LTE. The first technique is a server-side technique. It considers the available free buffer space at the client, burst size and TCP flow control while sending content to the client in periodic bursts. The second technique is a client-side technique that considers the probability of a user's abandonment during a video streaming session. In addition to the energy savings, we also study the performance of cellular networks in presence of our first proposed streaming technique.