GreenBag: Energy-Efficient Bandwidth Aggregation for Real-Time Streaming in Heterogeneous Mobile Wireless Networks

Abstract

Abstract-Modern mobile devices are equipped with multiple network interfaces, including 3G/LTE and WiFi. Bandwidth aggregation over LTE and WiFi links offers an attractive opportunity of supporting bandwidth-intensive services, such as high-quality video streaming, on mobile devices. However, achieving effective bandwidth aggregation in mobile environments raises several challenges related to deployment, link heterogeneity, network fluctuation, and energy consumption. We present GreenBag, an energy-efficient bandwidth aggregation middleware that supports real-time data-streaming services over asymmetric wireless links, requiring no modifications to the existing Internet infrastructure and servers. GreenBag employs several techniques, including medium load balancing, efficient segment management, and energy-aware mode control, to resolve such challenges. We implement a prototype of GreenBag on Android-based mobile devices which hosts, to the best knowledge of the authors, the first LTE-enabled bandwidth aggregation prototype for energyefficient real-time video streaming. Our experiment results in both emulated and real-world environments show that GreenBag not only achieves good bandwidth aggregation to provide QoS in bandwidth-scarce environments but also efficiently saves energy on mobile devices. Moreover, energy-aware GreenBag can minimize video interruption while consuming 14-25% less energy than the non-energy-aware counterpart in real-world experiments.

MSPlayer: Multi-Source and Multi-Path Video Streaming

“…Content Source Diversity: Current MPTCP design [11] and other similar approaches such as [7], only allow flows or paths to be established between a client and a single server. If the current YouTube infrastructure were to support MPTCP, users streaming videos from one server with high aggregate bandwidth through multiple paths could quickly incur server demand surges.…”

A system testbed for modeling encrypted video-streaming service performance indicators based on TCP/IP metrics

“…The use of NetEm in order to create laboratory testbeds has been already done [30][31][32]. In this work, the network emulator is treated as a black box, used to see the impact that different conditions may have on network-layer indicators.…”

Bandwidth aggregation techniques in heterogeneous multi-homed devices: A survey

“…In this case, instead of issuing different video-segment requests using the same interfaces, they distribute these requests across the different interfaces to enhance system performance and enable users to stream higher quality videos. Although, GreenBag [24] adopts the idea of distributing video requests across interfaces, they focus on minimizing the time of video playback along with energy consumption, while overlooking the ability to stream higher quality videos.…”

“…Interface characteristics estimation modules can then query this database to estimate the interfaces' energy consumption rates. On the other hand, GreenBag models the energy consumption of wireless interfaces (Wifi and LTE) as a function of the transmission time and the bandwidth used, as well as other constant factors that are technology dependent [24]. Their model takes into account the energy consumed in the active transmission/reception states and the TAIL state.…”