Power-Efficient Video Streaming on Mobile Devices Using Optimal Spatial Scaling

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to optimize spatial scaling and rate control for power-efficient mobile video streaming, achieving significant power savings with minimal quality loss across different networks and devices.

Contribution

It introduces an optimal parameter selection approach for spatial scaling and rate control to enhance power efficiency in mobile video streaming.

Findings

Up to 10% power savings with negligible quality loss.

Up to 15% power savings with tolerable distortions.

Method validated across Wi-Fi, mobile networks, and multiple smartphones.

Abstract

This paper derives optimal spatial scaling and rate control parameters for power-efficient wireless video streaming on portable devices. A video streaming application is studied, which receives a high-resolution and high-quality video stream from a remote server and displays the content to the end-user.We show that the resolution of the input video can be adjusted such that the quality-power trade-off is optimized. Making use of a power model from the literature and subjective quality evaluation using a perceptual metric, we derive optimal combinations of the scaling factor and the rate-control parameter for encoding. For HD sequences, up to 10% of power can be saved at negligible quality losses and up to 15% of power can be saved at tolerable distortions. To show general validity, the method was tested for Wi-Fi and a mobile network as well as for two different smartphones.