An energy-efficient multimedia streaming transport protocol over heterogeneous wireless networks

Abstract

This paper presents an energy-efficient multipath streaming transport protocol to support a seamless high-quality video streaming service over heterogeneous wireless networks. The proposed protocol employs raptor codes to alleviate video quality degradation caused by wireless channel errors and the diverse characteristics of wireless networks. Furthermore, it is designed to reduce the energy consumption of a mobile device because more energy is generally consumed to activate multiple wireless networks and perform supplementary raptor decoding. For energy saving at the receiver side, the proposed protocol not only shapes a video stream but determines the raptor encoding parameters such as code rate, symbol size, and the number of source symbols as well, while considering the energy consumption of on-the-fly raptor decoding. The proposed protocol is fully implemented using C/C++ and Java on an Android-based smartphone and examined over real heterogeneous wireless networks. The proposed protocol can achieve good energy efficiency while providing a seamless high-quality video streaming service compared with existing protocols.