In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a cross-layer framework for evaluating power and performance tradeoffs for video Streaming to mobile handheld systems. We utilize a distributed middleware layer to perform joint adaptations at all levels of system hierarchy - applications, middleware, OS, network and hardware for optimized performance and energy benefits. Our framework utilizes an intermediate server in close proximity of the mobile device to perform end-to-end adaptations such as admission control, intelligent network transmission and dynamic video transcoding. The knowledge of these adaptations are then used to drive "on-device" adaptations, which include CPU voltage scaling through OS based soft realtime scheduling, LCD backlight intensity adaptation and network card power management. We first present and evaluate each of these adaptations individually and subsequently report the performance of the joint adaptations. We have implemented our cross-layer framework (called DYNAMO) and evaluated it on Compaq iPaq running Linux using streaming video applications. Our experimental results show that such joint adaptations can result in energy savings as high as 54% over the case where no optimization are used while substantially enhancing the user experience on hand-held systems.
