  For mobile video codecs, the huge energy dissipation for external memory
traffic is a critical challenge under the battery power constraint. Lossy
embedded compression (EC), as a solution to this challenge, is considered in
this paper. While previous studies in EC mostly focused on compression
algorithms at the block level, this work, to the best of our knowledge, is the
first one that addresses the allocation of video quality and memory traffic at
the frame level. For lossy EC, a main difficulty of its application lies in the
error propagation from quality degradation of reference frames. Instinctively,
it is preferred to perform more lossy EC in non-reference frames to minimize
the quality loss. The analysis and experiments in this paper, however, will
show lossy EC should actually be distributed to more frames. Correspondingly,
for hierarchical-B GOPs, we developed an efficient allocation that outperforms
the non-reference-only allocation by up to 4.5 dB in PSNR. In comparison, the
proposed allocation also delivers more consistent quality between frames by
having lower PSNR fluctuation.
