Context-aware adaptation of mobile video decoding resolution
This work addresses energy efficiency for mobile users by enabling adaptive video quality, though it is incremental in applying approximate computing to mobile contexts.
The paper tackled the problem of high energy consumption in mobile video playback by proposing a context-aware adaptation of video decoding resolution, which reduces power consumption while meeting user quality expectations, with user studies showing that physical activity, video properties, and personality traits influence acceptable resolution.
While the evolution of mobile computing is experiencing a considerable growth, it is at the same time seriously threatened by the limitations of the battery technology, which does not keep pace with the evergrowing increase in energy requirements of mobile applications. A novel approach for reducing the energy appetite of mobile apps comes from the approximate computing field, which proposes techniques that in a controlled manner sacrifice computation accuracy for higher energy savings. Building on this philosophy we propose a context-aware mobile video quality adaptation that reduces the energy needed for video playback, while ensuring that a user's quality expectations with respect to the mobile video are met. We confirm that the decoding resolution can play a significant role in reducing the overall power consumption of a mobile device and conduct two user studies to investigate how the context in which a video is played, its content, and the user's personality, modulate a user's quality expectations. We discover that a user's physical activity, the spatial/temporal properties of the video, and the user's personality traits interact and jointly influence the minimal acceptable playback resolution, paving the way for context-adaptable approximate mobile computing.