Cross-layer design for delay- and energy-constrained multimedia delivery in mobile terminals

Multimedia delivery in mobile terminals has been a central topic in developing energy-efficient mobile multimedia computing systems. The major challenge remains how to achieve optimal consumption of the limited battery capacity and time budget for a given amount of tasks, yielding maximum quality-per-energy-unit performance. A system-level cross-layer design is key to QoSoriented energy utilization. In this article, we investigate the RED relation in the individual data processing and transmission components in the mobile terminal, and in the embedded system as a whole. The energy consumption tradeoff between computation and communication is analyzed. We introduce power management schemes for the computation and communication stages of the multimedia delivery process. The configurable parameters in this process that could impact the system performance are discussed. We demonstrate our energy measurement testbed for monitoring the battery status under different parameter configurations of the embedded system. The collected data are provided for energy consumption modeling used to direct the system configuration procedure. We present a cross-layer design mechanism for the resource constrained multimedia delivery in mobile terminals. Multiple software and hardware related parameters are coordinated to control the data processing and transmission for better energy and time budget utilization. A case study on the video delivery in the battery-powered IntelMote2 is conducted to validate the efficiency of the proposed cross-layer design.