Toward green media delivery: location-aware opportunities and approaches

Mobile media has undoubtedly become the predominant source of traffic in wireless networks. The result is not only congestion and poor quality of experience, but also an unprecedented energy drain at both the network and user devices. In order to sustain this continued growth, novel disruptive paradigms of media delivery are urgently needed. We envision that two key contemporary advancements can be leveraged to develop greener media delivery platforms: The proliferation of navigation hardware and software in mobile devices has created an era of location awareness, where both the current and future user locations can be predicted; and the rise of context-aware network architectures and self-organizing functionalities is enabling context signaling and in-network adaptation. With these developments in mind, this article investigates the opportunities of exploiting location awareness to enable green end-to-end media delivery. In particular, we discuss and propose approaches for location-based adaptive video quality planning, in-network caching, content prefetching, and long-term radio resource management. To provide insights on the energy savings, we then present a cross-layer framework that jointly optimizes resource allocation and multi-user video quality using location predictions. Finally, we highlight some of the future research directions for location-aware media delivery in the conclusion.