BETSY - BEing on Time Saves energY

Optimal balance between energy consumption and quality-of-service for battery-powered wireless multimedia devices.


The EU-funded (IST FP6) project BETSY strives to create an infrastructure for the optimal configuration of mobile, battery operated devices displaying video streams in WLANs. The optimization should cover the required bandwidth, the presentation (video/audio) quality and the energy consumption (i.e. the battery lifetime) of the mobile device. The infrastructure comprises re-usable models and design methodologies that take into account the effects on energy consumption, processing performance and network bandwidth as well as the compromises   necessary both during the design phase and dynamically at run-time. In addition, a resource control framework will be implemented which will use the models for validation in a test-bed of real and simulated devices.

Wireless multimedia streaming on hand-held, mobile or otherwise battery operated devices will be a major technology underlying the next-generation of information and entertainment appliances. The increasing media convergence of PCs with their data formats and multimedia consumer electronics like digital TV, mobile video players etc, makes wireless networks more and more a commodity in the homes of customers. 
The aim of the BETSY project is to have multimedia streams on wireless hand-held devices seamlessly adapted to fluctuating network conditions and available terminal resources while reducing the energy consumption of the stream processing. The basis of this adaption are the models and measurements elaborated in the project.

C-LAB’s involvement in the project is in the modelling of energy consumption and CPU load of typical mobile devices like PDAs or portable media players (PMP) with WLAN and ARM/XScale processors. It coordinates the implementation and integration of test-bed and demonstrator on selected embedded multimedia systems, using Linux as common platform. We expect that the conceptual work for the modelling and the implementation of the resource control framework will also be applicable in our research area Organic Computing, in particular for the optimization of power consumption and load balancing in server farms.

Project funded by: EU IST FP6
Project duration: 09/2004 - 02/2007
Project partners: Philips Electronics Nederland B. V. (NL), CSEM Centre Suisse D'electronique et Microtechnique SA - Recherche et Developpment (CH), Interuniversitair Micro-Electronica Centrum vzw, IMEC (B), Siemens AG (D), Industrial Systems Institute / Integrated Researchinformation Society (GR), Mälardalen Hoegskola (S), Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (NL) und University of Cyprus (CY)
Contact: Rainer Glaschick, C-LAB
Harmke de Groot, Philips Research, Projektleitung