Energy-Efficient Adaptive Transmission of Scalable Video Streaming in Cognitive Radio Communications

Cognitive radio (CR) is a promising technology to alleviate spectrum shortage and satisfy the huge demand of bandwidth for multimedia streaming in future mobile computing systems. The inherent features of CR pose tough challenges in provisioning quality of service (QoS) for acceptable user experience and minimizing energy consumption for multimedia transmissions. In this paper, scalable video coding and transmission rate adaptation are jointly considered in an energy-efficient scheme for transmissions of streaming media over CR with QoS guarantee. An event-driven discrete-time Markov control process model is introduced to formulate the QoS-guaranteed energy-efficient transmission problem as a constrained stochastic optimization problem. Based on estimations of potentials and the difference between performance measurement and QoS requirement, an online policy iteration algorithm is proposed to optimize energy consumption under QoS constraints directly. By exploiting the system dynamics, this algorithm does not depend on any prior knowledge of channel availability or fading statistics, and it can converge to a near optimum with a low computational burden. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.