Joint buffering and scheduling for power sensitive multimedia streaming in wireless networks

Abstract

An effective strategy to save power of mobile terminals (MTs) is to switch the Wireless Network Interface (WNI) to sleep mode when the predefined quality of service (QoS) can be guaranteed during the following time interval. However, it has found that this approach alone does not always work well if the inter-packet intervals of the multimedia streaming are very short. A new power-efficient scheme, called Joint Buffering and Scheduling (JBS) was proposed. By employing a shaping proxy at the base station (BS) to buffer the streaming packets as bursts, JBS eliminated the negative impact of the shorter inter-packet intervals on the power-efficient mechanisms. Further, by using our designed Power-efficient Opportunistic Scheduler (POS), JBS could provide each multimedia flow much higher throughput and excellent delay performance. An extensive set of simulations shows that JBS can provide each flow excellent playback quality while significantly reducing the power consumption of each WNI.