Adaptive Energy Optimization in Multimedia-Centric Wireless Devices: A Survey

Over the last couple of years, there has been an exponential increase in the number of applications accessible from various mobile handsets, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. In particular, rich media service distribution among smart-phones and other handheld devices is becoming increasingly popular among users. In fact, the next generation wireless technologies have put significant emphasis on supporting distribution of rich media content and video-on-demand services. However, energy consumption in the handheld wireless devices is a major bottleneck that hinders the growth of mobile device based rich media services. The biggest problem today in the mobile world is that the mobile devices are battery driven and the battery technologies are not matching the required energy demand. This paper outlines the major energy-consuming components in handheld devices like smart-phones, PDAs and other multimedia-centric wireless devices. Further, this paper surveys different research works on how the energy consumption could be optimized and provides detailed discussions on the latest energy saving techniques in the major components of the mobile devices. In addition, the paper surveys other systemic energy optimization techniques so that the overall battery life of the device is increased. Major global research projects and their research focus are then surveyed. Finally, a brief summary is provided along with some open research problems and different possible future research directions.