A power-aware multimedia streaming protocol for mobile users

Smart environments are becoming popular and even more users are approaching their services through portable devices like PDAs, laptops, and mobile phones. These devices are generally battery-fed, thus, energy efficiency is surely a critical factor for the deployment of pervasive services. In this paper we focus on the diffusion of multimedia streaming services in smart environments. Specifically, we investigate scenarios where mobile users who have a Wi-Fi access to the Internet receive audio files from remote streaming servers. We address energy saving by including periodic transmission interruptions in the schedule of audio frames at the server, so that the network interface card at the receiver can be set to a low-power consuming state. Experimentation on a software prototype shows that our solution makes possible an energy saving ranging from 76% to 91% (depending on the data rate and the background traffic) of the total consumption due to the network interface. It also preserves a good user level QoS.