Battery-aware rate adaptation for extending video streaming playback time

Multimedia streaming applications are computation and network intensive that put a high demand on battery usage of mobile devices. Battery usage forms an important metric in user satisfaction, as increased battery consumption results in faster battery depletion and eventually leads to battery outage. In this paper, we propose an adaptation technique, referred as Battery-Aware Rate Adaptation (BARA) scheme, which adapts to the appropriate bit rate to prolong the battery lifetime. BARA considers both the wireless channel conditions, as well as the device’s battery level, to determine the best transmission rate for optimizing the mobile battery consumption. Actual experiment and simulation results corroborate that compared to the conventional techniques, BARA can save more than 40% of battery power, while extending the video playback time by 20%.