Advancing energy efficiency and quality of experience in secure adaptive video streaming

The substantial growth of Internet video streaming has greatly increased resource utilization, particularly bandwidth and energy consumption, especially in systems secured through watermarking. However, the issue of decarbonization has received limited attention. As Quality of Experience (QoE) becomes a central focus, the complexity of these challenges intensifies. Adaptive bitrate algorithms often prioritize video quality while neglecting the associated energy costs, frequently selecting the highest available bitrate and thereby increasing energy consumption. Achieving a balance between QoE and energy efficiency requires careful optimization across multiple factors, including server-side processing, network stability, and bandwidth utilization. While watermarking enhances content protection and ensures secure delivery, it introduces additional computational overhead that increases energy consumption. This study aims to achieve seamless, high-quality video streaming by managing the trade-off between streaming security and QoE while minimizing energy impact. The findings underscore the importance of balancing robust security mechanisms with energy-aware optimization to achieve sustainable, secure, and high-quality video streaming. Numerical results obtained from real-world streaming scenarios validate the efficiency of the proposed method. Even with a 10% increase in the number of connected users, the proposed system reduces origin egress traffic by 25%. At the same time, CDN traffic increases by 23% due to the delivery of higher-bitrate video streams, indicating a 13% improvement in perceived video quality rather than a mere redistribution of system load.