Balancing energy and quality-awareness:a MAC-Llayer duty-cycle management solution for multimedia delivery over wireless mesh networks

Energy consumption has been a critical factor for mobile video applications. The quality of content delivery over wireless mesh networks consist of such devices is also considered important. Existing energy-aware research and industrial efforts focus on reducing high energy-consuming working periods of mesh devices, at the expense of decreasing the quality of video content. This article proposes an energy-quality-balanced solution AOC-MAC deployed at the MAC layer, working in conjunction with an energy-aware routing algorithm for wireless mesh devices. The simulation and perceptual test results are also presented in order to investigate the performance of the proposed solution. In particular, the impacts of content delivery data rate, mesh network topology scale and mesh device mobility are studied. Results demonstrate that AOC-MAC obtains up to 23% energy savings at roughly the same content delivery quality level, in comparison with the IEEE 802.11s MAC protocol.