Energy Considerations for WiFi Offloading of Video Streaming

The load on cellular networks is constantly increasing. Especially video streaming applications, whose demands and requirements keep growing, put high loads on cellular networks. A solution to mitigate the cellular load in urban environments is offloading mobile connections to WiFi access points, which is followed by many providers recently. Because of the large number of mobile users and devices there is also a high potential to save energy by WiFi offloading. In this work, we develop a model to assess the energy consumption of mobile devices during video sessions. We evaluate the potential of WiFi offloading in an urban environment and the implications of offloading connections on energy consumption of mobile devices. Our results show that, although WiFi is more energy efficient than 3G and 4G for equal data rates, the energy consumption increases with the amount of connections offloaded to WiFi, due to poor data rates obtained for WiFi in the streets. This suggests further deployment of WiFi access points or WiFi sharing incentives to increase data rates for WiFi and energy efficiency of mobile access.