Modeling and Analysis of Power Consumption in Live Video Streaming Systems

This article develops an aggregate power consumption model for live video streaming systems, including many-to-many systems. In many-to-one streaming systems, multiple video sources (i.e., cameras and/or sensors) stream videos to a monitoring station. We model the power consumed by the video sources in the capturing, encoding, and transmission phases and then provide an overall model in terms of the main capturing and encoding parameters, including resolution, frame rate, number of reference frames, motion estimation range, and quantization. We also analyze the power consumed by the monitoring station due to receiving, decoding, and upscaling the received video streams. In addition to modeling the power consumption, we model the achieved bitrate of video encoding. We validate the developed models through extensive experiments using two types of systems and different video contents. Furthermore, we analyze many-to-one systems in terms of bitrate, video quality, and the power consumed by the sources, as well as that by the monitoring station, considering the impacts of multiple parameters simultaneously.