Energy-Efficient Power Allocation for Delay-Sensitive Multimedia Traffic Over Wireless Systems

With the extremely high penetration rate of wireless broadband devices, the telecommunication industry predicts that the mobile data traffic will double almost every year for the next five years with more than two-thirds of the future traffic being mobile video. This trend clearly indicates that future mobile broadband networks will face the dual challenge of supporting large data volumes while providing reliable service for delay-sensitive mobile multimedia streams. This explosive demand for mobile multimedia communications has significantly increased not only spectrum requirements but also energy consumption. Energy-efficient communication is becoming a prime concern for mobile multimedia communications partially due to the fact that improvements in battery technology occur on a much slower scale than gains in processing power and energy consumption of electronic devices. Furthermore, the ever-increasing demand for wireless services and ubiquitous network access comes at the expense of a growing carbon footprint for the mobile wireless communication industry. This paper addresses resource allocation to maximize the energy efficiency of a wireless link under statistical quality-of-service (QoS) constraints for mobile multimedia traffic. In the energy-efficiency analysis, both circuit and transmit power values of mobile devices are taken into account. The joint impact of statistical QoS constraints, underlying circuit power consumption, transmission power, and spectral bandwidth is considered. The unique globally optimal power allocation scheme for delay-sensitive multimedia traffic is characterized. Intuition about optimal strategies is obtained by looking at both the low-signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) regime and the high-SNR regime.