Experimental study on luminance preprocessing for energy-aware HTTP-based mobile video streaming

In mobile multimedia services, preserving the battery life at the terminal is of utmost importance for user satisfaction, and suitable media processing at the device can be performed in order to reduce the brightness of the presented video, and to relent battery discharge. In this paper, we present a few experimental results assessing the impact, on the terminal power consumption, of a luminance preprocessing stage realized at the server side during mobile video streaming sessions. Based on these results, we recognize that luminance pre-processing at the server side reduces terminal consumption during mobile streaming much to the same extent as the processing realized at the client side. We further discuss the systems advantages of assigning this functionality to the server side. Specifically, this first result paves the way to further study on energy-aware streaming systems, where the streamed video data can be selected not only based on the encoding rates, as in conventional streaming, but also of energy-demanding video characteristics.