Energy-Aware Multi-Path Streaming of MPEG-4 FGS Video over Wireless

The wireless mobile nodes are self-powered and energy-sensitive. It is critical to prevent rapid energy dissipation while streaming high quality video over wireless. We investigate the energy consumption mode of mobile nodes and propose an energy-aware scheme for efficient streaming of MPEG-4 FGS video over multiple paths in wireless. We calculate the decoding aptitude of each FGS-coded frame before its decoding deadline, based on the available energy of a mobile node, in order to fully utilize its capacity to decode frames and avoid energy waste. We give the multi-path selection model that tries to minimize the packets drop probability on each path, while taking congestion, contention, channel error, interference and mobility into considerations. By incorporating the decoding aptitude with the path selection model, packets in each frame can be transmitted according to the available energy and throughput between mobile nodes, thus no energy is wasted. If the decoding aptitude is higher than the bandwidth on a single path, more packets can be transmitted over another path, thus the quality of received video can be progressively improved. This scheme is validated on Xscale-based mobile nodes.