Energy-Efficient Bandwidth Allocation for Multi-User Video Streaming Over Wlan

We consider the problem of packet scheduling for the transmission of multiple video streams over a wireless local area network (WLAN). A cross-layer optimization framework is proposed to minimize the wireless transceiver energy consumption while reaching the user required visual quality. The framework relies on the IEEE 802.11 standard and on a wavelet-based scalable video coding scheme. It extends our previous work on energy-efficient scheduling by introducing an application-level video quality metric as QoS constraint (instead of a quality metric at the level of the communication layers) and by reformulating the energy minimization problem subject to the QoS constraint in order to also consider the fairness among users. Simulation results demonstrate significant additional energy gains by means of these extensions.