Cloud-based video streaming with systematic mobile display energy saving: Rate-distortion-display energy profiling

Mobile display has been considered as the major contributor to the energy consumption of the ever-increasing mobile video services. Current practices in display energy reduction (DER) utilize local computing resources to analyze the video content before DER strategies can be applied in a per-device fashion. For a given video, same analytical computations are repeated in millions of individual devices. In this paper, we demonstrate that a paradigm shifting framework can be designed to systematically move the common DER local processing to the streaming server with the emergence of cloud-based video services. This framework has the potential to replace the massive per-device DER computation by a one-time global video processing in the cloud. To accomplish this ultimate goal in DER, a new family of video rate-distortion (R-D) profile with embedded DER strategies shall be properly generated. This family of rate-distortion-display energy (R-D-DE) profiles contains a set of common DER parameters to be directly extracted and employed by individual mobile devices to achieve desired display energy saving without repeated local computation. Performance evaluations of the proposed design are carried out to show that this family of R-D-DE profiles is indeed able to command the systematic DER design based on the intrinsic relationships among bitrate, video quality and display energy saving.