Smartphones are evolving at a fast rate in terms of their computational, storage, and communications capabilities. A high-end smartphone is equipped with multiple wireless interfaces with varying bit rates, energy consumption requirements, and coverage ranges. The joint utilization of the existing wireless interfaces facilitates the development of advanced techniques to boost the performance of wireless networks and enhance the experience of mobile users. Among these techniques is deviceto-device cooperation where a smartphone receives content from a base station on a given wireless interface and distributes it to other devices in its vicinity via another wireless interface. Another technique is traffic offloading in heterogeneous network scenarios where a smartphone downloads content using multiple wireless interfaces. In this paper, we study the readiness of high-end smartphones to utilize multiple wireless interfaces simultaneously focusing on capabilities and challenges. We adopt an experimental approach using a mobile cooperative video distribution testbed to obtain and evaluate performance results with focus on energy consumption. We consider various scenarios involving a combination of wireless technologies that include Bluetooth, WiFi, WiFi-Direct, and 3G.
Abstract-In a classical mobile video streaming architecture, the server is responsible for processing each request from the mobile clients even if those requests are for the same content in the same geographical area. This tends to be resource exhaustive in terms of complexity, radio resources, and energy consumption especially when delivering high bit rate multimedia content. In this paper, we exploit cooperation between network technologies to reduce the load placed on a given multimedia server and reduce the overall energy drain of mobile devices. We consider a set of mobile devices that wish to receive a common video content from a designated video server. The mobile devices organize themselves into multiple Bluetooth piconets. The master in each piconet receives an H.264 encoded video content from the server via an IEEE 802.11 WLAN access point and relays it to its slave mobile devices using standard Bluetooth connections. A prototypical implementation of the proposed model in an experimental testbed is used to perform energy and video quality measurements in real conditions. Results demonstrate notable energy consumption gains while maintaining video quality in various scenarios.
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