FPGA-accelerated HEVC encoder for energy-efficient multi-access edge computing

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) technologies can make real-time streaming media services available to users with reasonable bandwidth, but the computational complexity of HEVC tends to lead to increased energy consumption in these schemes. In this paper, we investigate the energy saving opportunities of utilizing a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) based HEVC encoder in edge media servers and devices. In practice, we analyze the energy impact of migrating our Kvazaar software HEVC intra encoder to Intel Arria 10 PCIe FPGA(s) on two platforms: 1) Nokia Airframe Cloud Server with 2.4 GHz dual 14-core Intel Xeon processors and 2) an embedded Jetson AGX Orin board with 2.2 GHz 12-core ARM processor. According to our experiments, FPGA encoding on these two platforms saved 76% and 86% of the energy taken up by software only encoding on Airframe, respectively. These results indicate the potential of FPGA-based video encoder acceleration in future green MEC architectures.