Trade-offs between compression, energy and quality of video streaming applications in wireless networks

As throughput of wireless technologies had improved rapidly over the last decade, handheld devices became more attractive to the end users enabling multimedia applications "on-the-move". The uptime of mobile devices depends on their battery power that is not growing at the pace of communication technologies. In this study we describe the trade-offs between the power consumption, compression and the quality of video streaming in wireless environment. We show that using scalable baseline profile of H.264 codec the careful choice of encoding parameters may result in significant energy and bitrate savings at the expense of only slight degradation in quality, if at all. The amount of motion in a sequence plays a crucial role for energy savings when packet loss probability is non-negligible.