Video broadcasting to heterogeneous mobile devices

Abstract

We study the problemof broadcasting multiple scalable video streams to heterogeneous mobile devices, which have limited energy budgets. We show that scalable video streams should be broadcast in a different manner than nonscalable streams; otherwise energy of mobile devices could be wasted. We propose an efficient broadcast scheme for mobile TV networks that explicitly supports heterogeneous mobile devices, and we show its correctness as well as performance in terms of energy saving. We implement the proposed scheme in a real mobile TV testbed to evaluate its performance. Our results indicate that, with the proposed broadcast scheme, significant energy savings can be achieved by different heterogeneous devices. For example, using the proposed broadcast scheme allows mobile devices to achieve energy saving between 62% to 92%, while using the current broadcast scheme only allows them to achieve energy saving 62% despite how many layers they can (or opt to) receive and decode. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2009.