Trade-offs for video-providers in LTE networks: Smartphone energy consumption vs wasted traffic

Abstract

Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks provide broadband Internet access to mobile users. One of the main use cases for LTE is a mobile video. When selecting a video transmission mechanism, a video provider has to consider different and orthogonal metrics. The consumer expects a high video Quality of Experience (QoE) and a low energy consumption during download and playback. The video provider is interested in minimizing its resources and corresponding costs, like bandwidth and wasted traffic. Wasted traffic occurs if a user aborts and additional video data is already downloaded but not played out, consuming resources unnecessarily. This raises the questions 1) how a video provider delivers the video contents while reducing the operational costs and satisfying the customers demands 2) what is the influence of the customer abort behaviour. To answer these questions, we first study the influence of mechanism selection on energy consumption and wasted traffic. Second, we show that the different user models do not influence the wasted traffic significantly. Finally, we provide parameter selection guidelines for the Streaming mechanism, which are shown to satisfy better both the requirements of the video provider as well as those of the customer, to achieve Pareto optimal results with regard to the smartphone energy consumption and wasted traffic.