Today more people are enjoying streaming services on their mobile devices from anywhere at anytime. However, receiving streaming services on mobile devices is fundamentally constrained by the limited battery power supply on a mobile device. In a streaming session, a large amount of battery power is consumed continuously for receiving the streaming data via the wireless network card, decoding the received data with the CPU, and displaying the decoded data on the screen. Although significant efforts have been made to save the battery power consumption, the existing streaming practice brings many new complexities due to the heterogeneity of device hardware, operating systems, and application algorithms, etc. These complexities lead to degraded energy efficiency.
This project aims to investigate new schemes to facilitate energy-efficient Internet mobile streaming services at different phases, ranging from the data receiving to the image displaying. The project addresses the challenges by mainly looking into the data transmission schedule on mobile devices, studying codec-aware dynamic voltage and frequency scaling, and devising dynamic content-adaptive displaying schemes for mobile devices in streaming sessions. The newly designed schemes can directly help mobile devices significantly improve the energy efficiency in streaming services. They also have great potentials to save battery power consumption in other power-hungry mobile applications. The research outcomes will be integrated into curriculum development and the participating undergraduate and graduate students will be trained with computer system research experience as the next generation computer scientists and engineers.
