An application-layer approach for energy-efficient multimedia streaming

The increasing demand for multimedia content incur 58.6% of the Internet traffic during the peak period in North America as of 2012. To better accommodate the demand, the computing power and networking components in data centres are being upgraded regularly, leading to higher energy bills. Among many works on energy efficiency, very little attention has been paid in making multimedia streaming systems energy efficient. In this paper, we propose E²Stream, an energy-efficient multimedia streaming system. Unlike existing proposals, E² Stream utilizes resources in both the data-centre and end-user devices in order to reduce the power consumed by the entire streaming system. Our evaluation results, based on energy profiles from real devices, show that E²Stream can dynamically choose energy-efficient source to stream the content, which effectively reduces the energy consumptions among end-user devices and routers involved in the streaming session.