Power Management Mechanism Exploiting Network and Video Information over Wireless Links

This article examines the ways in which cross-layer information from higher network layers may be utilized for more efficient power management in wireless networks and energy constrained mobile devices. In particular, we present and evaluate mechanisms that fine-tune transmission power according to information received from the transport (feedback reports from TFRC) and application (type of the video frame encoded) layers. Further improvements may be applied if the video encoding is done using capabilities of the SVC standard. We also describe power management adaptation techniques for wireless video transmission using the TFRC protocol that take into account feedback about the received video quality and try to adapt transmitting power accordingly. The purpose of the mechanisms is to utilize TFRC feedback and thus achieve a beneficial balance between the power consumption and the received video quality. The mechanisms proposed, offer significant improvements when used in terms of both power consumption and received video quality. All proposals are compared and evaluated using simulation.