Balancing quality and energy efficiency for mobile rich media service delivery in a future wireless heterogeneous network environment

Mobile devices have become a popular, almost essential technology in people's lives. They are capable of a large range of services including multimedia streaming and gaming. The performance of these devices is rapidly growing with new generations being released every year. A major limitation to mobile devices is the battery-life with modern devices struggling to survive a full day. Furthermore, the popularity of social networks and streaming services such as Facebook and YouTube have contributed to a massive global IP traffic growth with mobile devices being one of the main contributors. Advancing performance in devices further stimulates this growth with higher data rates required to meet user and technology demands. Current network solutions are not capable of sustaining such a growth in traffic alone. This thesis proposes a smart distributed cooperative approach for rich media delivery to heterogeneous mobile users in wireless environments. A cooperative distributed approach promotes reuse of data, takes traffic away from the network and allows extendibility. Achieving the vital balance between performance and energy is challenging in such an environment. The solutions proposed in this thesis to solve the problems above are: 1) The ENergy aware COoperative multimedia delivery solution (ENCO) monitors device performance in order to dynamically adapt requested quality to balance the energy cost and quality level in a cooperative scenario. Host selection is performed based on distance and load of the hosts. 2) The Mobile aware quality-oriented COoperative multimedia delivery solution (MENCO) proposes a novel distributed host selection mechanism that considers any mobility and selects the best host based on the velocity of travel. Hosts are selected so that they are within range for the required amount of time to successfully deliver the data