Power consumption analysis of video streaming in 4G LTE networks

Abstract

Video streaming, one of the most popular technologies for online video playback, has already been applied to 4G LTE networks. Previous work has been devoted to understanding the power consumption in general 4G LTE networks, while it is still unclear how the online video streaming makes impact on the power performance of mobile devices. Inspired by this, this paper investigates the relationship between the mobile device's power performance characteristics and the behaviours of video streaming in 4G LTE networks. There are many natural issues/questions that are clearly interesting and important, while it is non-trivial to answer these issues/questions exactly (e.g., where is the energy saving room? how much is it?). To address a series of issues like the above, we formulate our energy models together with an algorithm that can assist our analysis. Particularly, we design a systematic platform, and conduct a comprehensive and also deep analysis on the power consumption of video streaming in 4G LTE networks. Our experiments reveal us a series of valuable findings--the saving room in the network part is large (from 41.86 to 69.62%), the number of RRC tails and the transmission pattern could be promising for optimizing the power consumption, for example.