Power efficient peer-to-peer streaming to co-located mobile users

Abstract

The increasing popularity of Internet-capable mobile devices leads to the explosion of mobile data traffic. Although the emerging mobile broadband systems such as 4G LTE promise higher bandwidth and lower latency for video traffic, it is not power efficient to deliver video traffic over cellular networks. This paper studies how peer-to-peer communications via wireless local networks could complement the cellular networks so as to minimize the power consumption of mobile devices. Specifically, we consider the scenario in which a group of nearby mobile devices share the streaming contents, originated from the cellular networks, over the wireless local area networks in a peer-topeer manner. We focus on investigating how the mobile devices should cooperate to minimize their own power consumption. The problem has been formulated into a linear programming (LP) model, and numerical results show that at least 31% of the power consumption can be saved on mobile devices through the cooperation among them.1 Throughout the paper, the term power is used to denote the rate at which energy is consumed.