Energy considerations for ABR video streaming to smartphones: measurements, models and insights

Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) streaming is widely used in commercial video services. In this paper, we profile energy consumption of ABR streaming on mobile devices. This profiling is important, since the insights can help developing more energy-efficient ABR streaming pipelines and techniques. We first develop component power models that provide online estimation of the power draw for each component involved in ABR streaming. Using these models, we then quantify the power breakdown in ABR streaming for both regular videos and the emerging 360° panoramic videos. Our measurements validate the accuracy of the power models and provide a number of insights. We discuss use cases of the developed power models, and explore two energy reduction strategies for ABR streaming. Evaluation demonstrates that these simple strategies can provide up to 30% energy savings, with little degradation in viewing quality.