Application Based Handover: An Energy-Efficient Approach for Heterogeneous Networks

Energy efficiency in cellular and wireless networks is among the major concerns of the industry. This is of particular significance for some rural areas and for developing countries. Obviously, in such situations, preserving power by using green technologies can offer great benefit. In this work, we focus on improving the energy efficiency of an advanced heterogeneous network architecture. This architecture is a promising paradigm for increasing the capacity and coverage of existing networks. In this paradigm, through vertical handover, mobile clients or terminals are switched between various wireless communication technologies. The choice of the communication technologies is based on a QoS measure that combine application based effects with those related to network parameters. The power consumption of the terminal is a function of the utilized vertical handover approach. In this paper, we propose an application based vertical handover framework to reduce the battery power consumption of the mobile terminal. We have conducted the partial simulation of the whole framework. The simulation studies show that this approach has the potential capability of improving energy efficiency of the network by minimizing the continuous scanning process of the terminal.