ePF-DASH: Energy-efficient prefetching based dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP

Abstract

CISCO VNI predicted an average annual growth rate of 69.1% for mobile video traffic between 2013 and 2018 and accordingly much academic research related to video streaming has been initiated. In video streaming, Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) is a streaming technique in which a source video is stored on a server at variable encoding rates and each streaming user requests the most appropriate video encoding rate from the server considering their channel capacity or signal power. However, these days, ABR related studies are only focusing on real-time rate adaptation and omitting efficiency in terms of energy. These methods do not consider the energy limited characteristics of mobile devices, which cause dissatisfaction to the streaming users. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient prefetching based dynamic adaptive streaming technique by considering the limited characteristics of the batteries used in mobile devices, in order to reduce the energy waste and provide a similar level of service in terms of the average video rate compared to the latest ABR streaming technique which does not consider the energy consumption.