Energy efficient streaming for smartphone by video adaptation and backlight control

Smartphone becomes an indispensable gadget in our daily life. Prolonging battery life on smartphone can extend the usability of the phone without being recharged, especially for accessing streaming video, which is a paramount service in the mobile Internet era. Many researchers have proposed energy efficient streaming methods, including bandwidth control and packet scheduling. Such studies have focused on reducing the energy consumption of central processing units (CPUs) and wireless networks; however, screens may drain substantial energy on smartphone. In this study, an energy efficient streaming system is proposed, combining adaptive coding and a backlight control mechanism. A non-parametric signal prediction is used to predict the network condition and then some adaptive encoding parameters are subsequently adjusted to fit the network capability. A histogram equalization is applied to compensate for the loss of image contrast after reducing the backlight. To validate the proposed concept, some experiments were conducted and the corresponding results show that the proposed streaming system can effectively reduce energy consumption on smartphone, while accessing the video streaming service.