Profiling energy consumption of DASH video streaming over 4G LTE networks

Abstract

Video streaming is a major source of unprecedented traffic growth in mobile networks, especially in high-speed 4G LTE networks. However, video streaming also poses a critical challenge on energy consumption. The battery-on smartphones and tablets can not sustain active online video streaming for several hours over cellular networks. In this paper, we seek to understand how DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) based video streaming can be energy efficient in the context of LTE networks. We profile the impacts of different streaming strategies and configurations (i.e., segment length and buffer size) on energy consumption. We analyze radio resource control (RRC) to explain and quantify their impacts. Our measurements in real LTE networks show that there still exists a large saving space (more than 30%) for us to improve energy efficiency of mobile devices using appropriate DASH settings. The saving space in some extreme cases can be even larger.