Green media: the future of wireless multimedia networks [Guest Editorial]

y 2015, with the proliferation of wireless multimedia applications and services (e.g., mobile TV, video on demand, online video repositories, immersive video interaction, peer to peer video streaming, and interactive video gaming), and anytime anywhere communication, the number of smartphones and tablets will exceed 6.5 billion as the most common web access devices. Data volumes in wireless multimedia data-intensive applications and mobile web services are projected to increase by a factor of 10 every five years, associated with a 20 percent increase in energy consumption, 80 percent of which is multimedia traffic related. In turn, multimedia energy consumption is rising at 16 percent per year, doubling every six years. It is estimated that energy costs alone account for as much as half of the annual operating expenditure. This has prompted concerted efforts by major operators to drastically reduce carbon emissions by up to 50 percent over the next 10 years. Clearly, there is an urgent need for new disruptive paradigms of green media to bridge the gap between wireless technologies and multimedia applications. The purpose of this Feature Topic is to solve pressing problems in relation to the increase in energy consumption due to growing multimedia applications. Volume-intensive power-demanding visual traffic over today’s network presents new challenges in processing, storage, extraction, and management. The aim is to answer fundamental and practically relevant questions related to design and analysis of: 1) low-power multimedia computing including in-network processing, compression/coding, and signal sensing; 2) low-power multimedia transmission including large-scale hierarchical networks, distributed network storage, and visual sensor networks; 3) lowpower multimedia rendering and display including content adaptive display adaptation, environment adaptive presentation, and multimedia display technologies; and 4) low-power multimedia system design including software and hardware architectures, scalable computations, and low-memory implementations. The goal is to cut energy costs arising from excessive sensing, extraction, storage, and signaling. From a network perspective, the aim is to capture realistic behaviors of irregularly dispersed infrastructure, changing socio-spatial configurations, geographic variability due to unplanned deployment of user-installed access points, randomly located nodes, multiclass distributed channel access, and channel propagation characteristics. From a media perspective, the aim is to capture perfect synergy across low-power distributed network computing, embedded vision processing, real-time media data analysis, in-network real-time semantic processing, and camera node management. Against this backdrop, this Feature Topic will address several important interrelated questions for next-generation heterogeneous networks of uninterrupted green media exchange. We expect that through this Feature Topic, we can foster new solutions to the design, evaluation, and application of wireless green media. This Feature Topic brings together leading researchers and developers from diverse disciplines in system, hardware, software, and application design to the forefront of green radio communications for future sustainable networks. In response to the call for contributions, we GREEN MEDIA: THE FUTURE OF WIRELESS MULTIMEDIA NETWORKS