Balancing Energy and Quality Awareness: A MAC-Layer Duty Cycle Management Solution for Multimedia Delivery Over Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Abstract-Energy consumption has been a critical factor for mobile video applications. The quality of content delivery over wireless mesh networks consist of such devices is also considered important. Existing energy-aware research and industrial efforts focus on reducing high energy-consuming working periods of mesh devices, at the expense of decreasing the quality of video content. This article proposes an energy-quality-balanced solution AOC-MAC deployed at the MAC layer, working in conjunction with an energy-aware routing algorithm for wireless mesh devices. The simulation and perceptual test results are also presented in order to investigate the performance of the proposed solution. In particular, the impacts of content delivery data rate, mesh network topology scale and mesh device mobility are studied. Results demonstrate that AOC-MAC obtains up to 23% energy savings at roughly the same content delivery quality level, in comparison with the IEEE 802.11s MAC protocol.Index Terms-energy consumption, MAC-layer duty cycle management, perceptual testing, wireless mesh networks. I. INTRODUCTIONVER the past decades, the demand for support for data communications has increased significantly. With the advances in wireless mesh network technology, usage of wireless mesh devices has increased rapidly, accompanied by the growth of data traffic of high-level rich network services. High user Quality of Service/Experience (QoS/QoE) for such services is considered essential for further development of wireless mesh devices. It has been a challenge over the past Copyright (c) years to provide high quality video-related mobile services with QoS/QoE provisioning over wireless mesh networks, as the network resources involved, such as channel bandwidth and signal strength, are often constrained. The energy consumption of wireless mesh devices is another important research issue nowadays, as they often have limited power budgets while performing complex and energy-consuming application tasks. It is clear that energy-saving at the mesh points is needed for offering the ability to maintain high-quality video delivery service. Mesh points unnecessarily spend energy in many situations in existing wireless mesh networks, especially when they are idle waiting for incoming traffic. Based on such background, the fundamental task to achieve energy -effectiveness is to reduce the excess and useless work periods and to allow the mesh points to have a longer off-time while also maintaining good Quality-of-Service (QoS) levels.This article presents the detailed principles of the energy-aware MAC-layer solution AOC-MAC previously introduced in [1]. AOC-MAC is an energy-aware mesh router duty cycle management scheme for high-quality video deliveries over wireless mesh networks. It manages the sleep-periods of mesh devices in smart manner based on link-state communication conditions, reducing the energy consumption of mesh routers by extending their sleep-periods. AOC-MAC works in conjunction with an innovative energy-aware network-layer rout...

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