Multimedia content distribution nowadays becomes the dominating traffic in wireless communication networks. In the meanwhile, battery energy limitation becomes the primary constraint of mobile computing devices. This project explores solutions to bridge the fundamental gap between higher layer traffic-intensive multimedia applications and lower layer energy efficient wireless communication protocols. In particular, this project investigates new cross layer approaches to identify crucial position information from unimportant value information in multimedia and to reduce energy consumption in communication networks with regards to position and value differences.
The goal of this project is to establish a new energy-quality optimized framework for wireless multimedia communications that takes advantage of position-value diversity in natural digital images and videos. The research objective is to test the hypothesis that position-based cross-layer resource allocation can improve energy efficiency in wireless multimedia communications. The project consists of three essential components: (1) a unified higher layer position-value separation methodology for various image and video compression formats, (2) energy efficient position-based lower layer resource allocation algorithms to allocate communication resource unequally, and (3) lower layer data-centric wireless relay protocols to transmit multimedia energy efficiently. The algorithms and protocols developed through this project casts new insights on designing energy efficient wireless multimedia communication systems. This project also integrates research findings into related undergraduate and graduate courses and Native American minority student advising.
