Energy-efficient MAC-layer error recovery for mobile multimedia applications in 3GPP2 BCMCS

Abstract

Combining broadcast and mobile phone technologies, 3GPP2 has introduced the Broadcast and Multicast Services (BCMCS) architecture to deliver multimedia content over cdma2000 1xEV-DO wireless networks. In designing a mobile device to support multimedia broadcast services, it is important to reduce delay and energy consumption, while maintaining a tolerable level of data loss. We analyse the energy consumed by a mobile device receiving broadcast services, focusing on error recovery using the Reed-Solomon (RS) MAC-layer coding scheme. Our model is based on the energy consumed by each computational component of the RS decoder, which we determined by running the decoding process on a realistic ARM7TDMI testbed with experimentally justified cache sizes, and characterizing the energy consumption accurately with the SNU Energy Explorer. By varying the radio channel conditions, RS coding scheme and other system parameters, we determined energy-efficient cache configurations and operating ranges for each RS encoding scheme, corresponding to given levels of service quality in a video application. We have also found that significant energy can be saved by selecting a size of error control block that is appropriate to the target video quality and the channel conditions at the mobile.