Content-aware resource allocation in OFDM systems for energy-efficient video transmission

Demand on multimedia content by consumers' handheld devices over wireless channels is on the increase. In view of the accelerated trend towards consumption of high quality video, power utilization by mobile devices is expected to excessively increase. Hence, it becomes equally important to advance more efficient power minimization techniques, in light of the short battery life in portable devices. However, power minimization algorithms that adopt consumers' perceptual quality of video have not received adequate research. This paper proposes a joint optimization of energy and quality requirements in a multiuser orthogonal frequencydivision multiplexing environment. A multi-objective optimization problem is formulated with the aim to identify bitrate allocations among users such that total power is minimized, and average quality is maximized. For this, a content-aware and energy-efficient resource allocation scheme (CaERAS) is proposed based on genetic and greedy algorithms. Simulation results show that CaERAS, as a lowcomplexity scheme, outperforms comparable methods in terms of efficiency and selectivity of suboptimal solutions. It is shown to acquire a suboptimal solution in as low as 0.0025 of the search space in previous methods. Also, a significant average saving of 85.66% in required energy is observed in broadcast transmission as opposed to unicast transmission.