A resource management strategy in wireless multimedia communications-total power saving in mobile terminals with a guaranteed QoS

The integration of multimedia services into wireless communication networks is a major source of future technological advances. One of the main challenging issues in this endeavor is the resource optimization strategy. This paper addresses this issue from the perspective of minimizing the total power consumption of a mobile terminal while maintaining a guaranteed quality-of-service (QoS). For many years, the management strategy has dealt primarily with bandwidth allocation, network capacity, and QoS. However, due to the integration of multimedia services, the increasing energy consumption of a mobile unit is also becoming a dominant factor in the design of communication systems. In this paper, we describe two technologies that can make a wireless multimedia communication system more energy-efficient while ensuring QoS. These technologies consist of an energy-efficient communication protocol for the uplink channel and a low-complexity multirate transmission scheme. We also provide a video transmission example using the H.263 standard in the proposed system to demonstrate the importance of our total power optimization strategy. The simulation results show that a savings of 10-32% is achieved in the total energy consumption of the mobile unit.