A measurement study of resource utilization in internet mobile streaming

Abstract

The pervasive usage of mobile devices and wireless networking support have enabled more and more Internet stream- ing services to all kinds of heterogeneous mobile devices. However, Internet mobile streaming services are challenged by the inherently limited on-device resources, device heterogeneity, and the bulk amount of streaming data. In this paper, focusing on resource utilization and streaming quality on mobile devices, we investigate 10 deployed Internet mobile streaming services that employ client-server, client-proxy-server, and P2P architectures from a client's perspective. We find that (1) existing Internet mobile streaming services mainly use the client-server architecture and commonly adopt burst traffic delivery that can save battery power consumption on mobile devices; (2) to deal with device heterogeneity, some streaming services have already utilized intermediate nodes (often the user's home computer) for online transcoding with a client-proxy-server architecture, but currently they lack power-friendly design for mobile devices; (3) a mobile device in P2P streaming consumes significantly more battery power mainly due to the inevitable P2P control traffic and uploading traffic to other peers. These findings provide us new insights to further optimize Internet mobile streaming in the future.