A Message-Scheduling Scheme for Energy Conservation in Multimedia Wireless Systems

Reducing power consumption of wireless networks has become a major goal in designing modern multimedia wireless systems. In an effort to reduce power consumption, this paper addresses the issue of scheduling real-time messages in multimedia wireless networks subject to both timing and power constraints. A power-consumption model is introduced to calculate power-consumption rates in accordance with message-transmission rates. Next, a new message-scheduling scheme called Power-aware Real-time Message (PARM) is developed to generate message-transmission schedules that minimize power consumption of multimedia wireless-network interfaces and the probability of missing deadlines for real-time messages. With a power-aware scheduling policy in place, the proposed PARM scheme is very energy-efficient. Experimental results based on a wide variety of synthetic workloads and eight real-world applications show that PARM significantly reduces energy dissipation while maintaining low missed rates. PARM reduces power consumption of data transmissions by up to 99.4% (with an average of 86.7%) for synthetic network traffic and saves energy by up to 60.0% (with an average of 34.1%) in the eight real-world applications.