Implementation and evaluation of cooperative video streaming for mobile devices

A promising approach for power reduction in mobile devices is peer-to-peer cooperation. In this paper, we present a testbed system implementation to evaluate the performance of an infrastructure controlled cooperative video streaming architecture. A number of mobile devices in close proximity are connected to the Internet through a wireless access point and are all requesting the same video stream from a dedicated server. Instead of sending the stream independently to each device, the server distributes the video packets among the devices, over a long-range wireless link using WLAN technology; the devices then exchange the received packets among each other over short-range wireless links using Bluetooth technology. The implemented testbed is used to experimentally demonstrate the power reduction gains in mobile devices and to derive an analytical model that relates power consumption to various design and system parameters.