An energy-efficient protocol for multimedia streaming in a mobile environment

Pervasive services and smart environments are becoming more and more popular as an ever-increasing number of people enjoys these services typically by means of portable devices. These devices are battery-fed and, thus, energy efficiency is a critical factor for the deployment of pervasive services. In this paper we focus on multimedia streaming services for mobile users. Specifically, we consider a scenario where mobile users with Wi-Fi devices access the Internet to receive audio files from a remote streaming server. We propose a proxybased architecture and an energy-efficient streaming protocol that minimize the energy consumption of the Wi-Fi interface at the mobile device, while guaranteeing the real-time constraints of the audio streaming. The experimental analysis performed on a prototype implementation shows that our solution allows an energy saving ranging from 76% to 91% of the total consumption due to the network interface. Moreover, it also preserves a good user-level Quality of Service.