Improving playout rate of streaming service with power efficiency over wireless multihop networks

There is a trade-off problem between power consumption and streaming service quality over the wireless multihop networks. If the transmission power increases to overcome the bad link condition, the quality of streaming service can improve, but it can stress the other links and deplete the battery power of nodes. However, since the existing algorithms for streaming services do not consider this trade-off problem, streaming service quality cannot be guaranteed with the high power efficiency. In this study, the authors formulate the optimisation problem to solve the trade-off problem. Then, the authors propose a new cross-layer algorithm to achieve the derived optimal solution. The proposed cross-layer approach covers three layers: application layer, transport layer and physical layer. The newly proposed cross-layer algorithm not only avoids the underflow and the overflow of the decoder buffer, but also achieves the high playout rate and the high power efficiency. Through simulation results, it is shown that the proposed algorithm achieves the high and smooth playout rate with the high power efficiency.