Energy-budget-compliant adaptive 3D texture streaming in mobile games

Abstract

Advances in computing hardware and novel multimedia applications have urged the development of handheld mobile devices such as smartphones and PDAs. Amongst the most used applications on handheld devices are mobile 3D graphics such as 3D games and 3D virtual environments. With this significant increase of mobile applications and games, one of the challenges is how to efficiently transmit the bulky 3D information to resource-constrained mobile devices. Despite the many attractive features, 3D graphics impose significant demands on the limited battery capacity of mobile devices. Thus the development of efficient approaches to decrease the amount of streamed data with the aim of increasing the battery lifetime has become a key research topic.In this paper, we design and implement an adaptive priority-based context-aware framework for efficiently streaming 3D textures to mobile devices with limited energy budget over wireless networks. Our results show that using our proposed adaptations significantly improves the gameplay quality per unit of energy consumed to download 3D textures in mobile games.