Energy efficient ANDSF-assisted network discovery for non-3GPP access networks

The aim of this paper is to improve the energy efficiency during network discovery in heterogeneous networking environments. To this end, we propose a novel network discovery algorithm that exploits both user and network context information in order to efficiently adapt the network scanning period, thus avoiding unnecessary energy-consuming scanning or mis-detection of available networks that can be used as targets of handover. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared against a system that performs network scanning in a periodic manner, without taking into consideration the user and network context information. According to simulation results, the system that employs the proposed network discovery algorithm achieves significant performance improvement in terms of energy consumption and network detection delay, with no loss in the network detection rate.