E-ARMANS: Energy-aware device-oriented video delivery in heterogeneous wireless networks

The latest technological development of smartphones and tablets has supported an exponential increase in demand for multimedia content from their users. At the same time, the battery-related technologies for these devices have not advanced at the same pace and are an important limitation factor for future developments. Therefore there is a need for energy-aware solutions for multimedia delivery to such mobile devices and this paper focuses on energy saving in the context of multimedia distribution at high quality levels over loaded heterogeneous wireless networks. The paper proposes an energy-aware device-oriented video delivery algorithm (E-ARMANS) as a solution to a twofold problem: Traffic load balancing over wireless networks and energy consumption optimization. E-ARMANS evaluates both network conditions and device characteristics and provides the user the best connectivity in given conditions. Testing in comparison with a performance-oriented approach shows how E-ARMANS increases average battery life with 40%, 47%, and 32%, while delivering video content to devices with 1080p, 720p, and 576p resolutions, respectively.