EdgeSaver : Edge-Assisted Energy-Aware Mobile Video Streaming for User Retention Enhancement

Video streaming service is one of the most important IoT applications/services at the mobile end. To provide better services and earn more customers, the mobile video service providers have paid considerable attention to enhance end users' Quality of Experience (QoE) in video streaming. As an important aspect of the mobile device, however, the battery power and its impacts on the mobile services were seldom concerned. According to our survey over 2000+ mobile users, the low battery power of mobile phones could cause the user to give up watching videos. To quantify the relationship between the battery power and user's video abandoning probability (VAP), we first extract the VAP model from the collected survey data, leveraging a reversed accumulative histogram approach. Then, referring to the quantified VAP model, we present EdgeSaver, an edge-assisted video transmission framework, which aims at maintaining a sustainable overall user retention rate for the service providers by reducing the power consumption of video playback at the mobile ends. Particularly, as the core component of EdgeSaver, a low-power video scheduler is designed to strategically select user groups, such that the most profitable outcome can be achieved under the constraints of limited edge resources. With extensive experiments using a real-world data set, we demonstrate that EdgeSaver can help the mobile video service provider improve the user retention rate by up to 30% and increase the average user viewing time by 20%. © 2014 IEEE.