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An optimal speed control scheme supported by media servers for low-power multimedia applications

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Abstract

In this paper, we present a new concept of dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) for low-power multimedia decoding in battery-powered mobile devices. Most existing DVS techniques are suboptimal in achieving energy efficiency while providing the guaranteed playback quality of service, which is mainly due to the inherent limitations of client-only approaches. To address this problem, in this paper, we investigate the possibility of media server supported DVS techniques with smoothing mechanisms. Towards this new direction, we propose a generic offline bitstream analysis framework and an optimal speed control algorithm which achieves the maximal energy savings among all feasible speed profiles for the given buffers. The proposed scheme enables us to compute the buffer sizes of feasibility condition, which are the theoretical lower bound of buffer size requirement for a given media clip. More importantly, our scheme facilitates practical applications from four aspects. First, it does not require feedback information on clients’ configuration. This renders our scheme particularly suitable for broadcast or multicast applications. Second, the speed profile based on buffer sizes of feasibility condition can provide satisfactory energy efficiency. Third, the required buffer sizes are so small that they can be met by most mobile devices. Fourth, additional side information (i.e., speed profile) of the proposed scheme is negligible compared to the size of media content. These properties solve the diversity issue and feasibility issue of media server supported DVS schemes. Experimental results show that, in comparison with the representative existing techniques, our scheme improves the performance of DVS significantly.

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Correspondence to Ye Wang.

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Communicated by Ralf Steinmetz.

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Huang, W., Wang, Y. An optimal speed control scheme supported by media servers for low-power multimedia applications. Multimedia Systems 15, 113–124 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-009-0153-5

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