Energy aware multimedia messaging services across networks and across devices for mobile users

The extensive coverage of wireless networks brings tremendous opportunities for messaging services to satisfy the demands of accessing multimedia and time-critical information from mobile users. This trend makes energy efficiency an increasing challenge on mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a novel solution toward meeting this challenge. We explore communications utilities along both "cross-network" and "cross-device" dimensions for managing multimedia messaging services. Along the cross-network dimension, we consider the multitude of networking capabilities at a mobile terminal and select the most energy-efficient communication medium to maintain the connectivity or accomplish data transfer. Along the cross-device dimension, we consider the multitude of user interface devices by which mobile users can further improve overall energy efficiency in consuming multimedia messages. In this writing, we discuss our method as a position paper. Related experiments were performed and results are presented to justify our approach.