SMC: Smart Media Compression for Edge Storage Offloading

With the pervasiveness and growth in media technology, user-generated content has become intertwined with our day-to-day life. Such advancements however, have enabled the exponential growth in media file sizes, which leads to shortage of storage on small-scale edge devices. Online clouds are generally a potential solution, however, they raise privacy concerns, are not fully automated, and do not adapt to different networking environments (rural/urban/metropolitan). Distributed storage systems rely on their distributed nature to combat concerns over privacy and are adaptable to different networking environments. Nevertheless, such systems lack optimization via compression due to energy concerns on edge devices. In this work, we propose Smart Media Compression (SMC) for distributed edge storage systems. SMC dynamically adjusts compression parameters, in order to reduce the amount of needless compression, thus reducing energy consumption while providing smaller user file access delays. Our results show an improvement in average file access delay by up to 90%, while only costing an additional 14% in energy consumption.