Abstract— With the fast-paced development of computing technologies, mobile devices have almost sufficient com-putation and communication capabilities to support mo¬bile multimedia applications such as multimedia streaming, VoIP, and mobile TV. However, most existing mobile devices are powered by battery with limited energy resource. To support multimedia on battery-powered mobile devices, how to efficiently utilize the limited power source and other limited network resources has become one of the major challenges in mobile multimedia system design. It has been shown that achieving a satisfactory user experience needs a systematic consideration of both video source adapta¬tion and network transmission adaptation, indicating that the core of mobile multimedia system design is how to achieve a good balance of the power consumption between computation usage and communication usage. In other words, it depends on how to jointly select video source parameters and channel parameters based on the video content characteristics, available network resources, and underlying network conditions, given the fact that the power management schemes as well as the nonlinear battery effects also affect the system power consumption of mobile devices. In this paper, we review the recent advances in power-aware mobile multimedia, especially the adaptation technologies applied in video coding and delivery. In addition, the major research challenges in the field are demonstrated and discussed, which include power-management for mobile devices, rate-distortion-complexity optimized video codec design, and computational complexity and power aware cross-layer design and optimization. At the end, we propose a number of future research directions for audiences to continue investigation in this field.

Index Terms— Power-aware multimedia, H.264, power man-agement, joint source-channel coding, power adaptation, cross-layer design and optimization

Cite:Jiucai Zhang, Dalei Wu, Song Ci, Haohong Wang, and Aggelos K. Katsaggelos , "Power-Aware Mobile Multimedia: a Survey," Journal of Communications, vol. 4, no.9, pp.600-613, 2009. Doi:10.4304/jcm.4.9.600-613