EAVE: Error-Aware Video Encoding Supporting Extended Energy/QoS Trade-offs for Mobile Embedded Systems

Energy/QoS provisioning is challenging for video applications over lossy wireless network with power-constrained mobile handheld devices. In this work, we exploit the inherent error tolerance of video data to generate a range of acceptable operating points by controlling the amount of errors in the system. In particular, we propose an error-aware video encoding technique, EAVE, that intentionally injects errors while ensuring acceptable QoS. The expanded trade-off space generated by EAVE allows system designers to comparatively evaluate different operating points with varying QoS and energy consumption by aggressively exploiting error-resilience attributes, and could potentially result in significant energy savings. The novelty of our approach resides in active exploitation of errors to vary the operating conditions for further optimization of system parameters. Moreover, we present the adaptivity of our approach by incorporating the feedback from the decoding side to achieve the QoS requirement under the dynamic network status. Our experiments show that EAVE can reduce the energy consumption for an encoding device by up to 37% for a video conferencing application over a wireless network without quality degradation, compared to a standard video encoding technique over test video streams. Further, our experimental results demonstrate that EAVE can expand the design space by 14 times with respect to energy consumption and by 13 times with respect to video quality (compared to a traditional approach without active error exploitation) on average, over test video streams.