Energy measurements for mobile cooperative video streaming

In a classical mobile video streaming architecture, the server is responsible for processing each request from the mobile clients even if those requests are for the same content in the same geographical area. This tends to be resource exhaustive in terms of complexity, radio resources, and energy consumption especially when delivering high bit rate multimedia content. In this paper, we exploit cooperation between network technologies to reduce the load placed on a given multimedia server and reduce the overall energy drain of mobile devices. We consider a set of mobile devices that wish to receive a common video content from a designated video server. The mobile devices organize themselves into multiple Bluetooth piconets. The master in each piconet receives an H.264 encoded video content from the server via an IEEE 802.11 WLAN access point and relays it to its slave mobile devices using standard Bluetooth connections. A prototypical implementation of the proposed model in an experimental testbed is used to perform energy and video quality measurements in real conditions. Results demonstrate notable energy consumption gains while maintaining video quality in various scenarios.