Energy-aware cost-effective cooperative mobile streaming on smartphones over hybrid wireless networks

The ever-increasing demands on mobile streaming over smartphones make the cellular networks always occupied by heavy load under traditional base-station-to-device (B2D) based streaming architecture, and even degrade the quality of service (QoS) seriously. To offload the traffic of cellular networks and provide scalable mobile streaming services with guaranteed QoS, in this paper we propose a device-to-device (D2D) communication motivated cooperative streaming framework by exploiting the capacity of both WiFi interface and cellular interface equipped with smartphones. Specifically, under the energy constraint of individual smartphone, we develop technique to minimize the over traffic of the cellular network by efficiently disseminating video over the D2D network with multi-hop routing supported. We formulate such an energy-aware cost-effective video dissemination problem as an integer linear programming problem, and show it to be NP-hard and even hard to approximate. We further present an energy allocation based algorithm and a simulated annealing heuristic algorithm which provide a trade-off between the performance and complexity to support the dissemination scheduling of cooperative mobile streaming. We evaluate the performance effectiveness of our proposal via both theoretical analysis and extensive simulation.