Power-aware Encoding Scheme for RDA-based Mobile Clouds

Abstract

Often referred to as a supercomputer on palm of one’s hand, mobile cloud computing is expected to be the next big trend in cloud computing research area. Integrated into cloud environments, the mobile device overcomes its weakness of resource-limited settings. In an RDA-based mobile cloud computing which has been defined in this work, effective remote display protocols are one essential technology for enabling the vision of it. However, existing remote display protocols have been developed for non-mobile computers such as desktops and are not ready to fully embrace the challenges and requirements distinct to mobile devices in mobile cloud computing settings. Indeed, few studies on remote protocol framework consider power constraint and much research have focused on more performance for better quality of images in the area. Recognizing the importance of energy efficiency on mobile devices, this work, first, investigates the correlation between energy consumption and various encoding types, and proposes the power-aware encoding scheme to maximize the connection lifespan of battery-driven devices to the cloud. Power-aware encoding scheme for RDA-based mobile clouds considers the patterns of power consumption by CPUs and wireless network interface cards for the purpose of reducing power usage for remote display activities. Experimental results show that the proposed hybrid encoding scheme outperforms existing approaches in terms of power efficiency. In addition, even though the motivation of developing power-aware encoding schemes is to improve energy consumption behavior rather than the quality of service (QoS) for delivering RDA-based mobile services, the difference of QoS of proposed method was neither quantitatively nor qualitatively significant.