Balancing Energy and Quality Awareness: A MAC-Layer Duty Cycle Management Solution for Multimedia Delivery Over Wireless Mesh Networks

Energy consumption has been a critical factor for mobile video applications. The quality of content delivery over wireless mesh networks consisting of such devices is also considered important. Existing energy-aware research and industrial effort focuses on reducing high-energy-consuming working periods of mesh devices at the expense of decreasing the quality of video content. This paper proposes AOC-MAC, an energy-quality-balanced solution, deployed at the medium access control (MAC) layer, which works in conjunction with an energy-aware routing algorithm for wireless mesh devices. The simulation and perceptual test results are also presented to investigate the performance of the proposed solution. In particular, the impacts of content delivery data rate, mesh network topology scale, and mesh device mobility are studied. Results demonstrate that AOC-MAC obtains up to 23% energy savings at roughly the same content delivery quality level in comparison with the IEEE 802.11s MAC protocol.