An Energy-Efficient Handover Scheme with Geographic Mobility Awareness in WiMAX-WiFi Integrated Networks

Abstract

WiFi networks have been deployed in many regions such as buildings and campuses to provide wireless Internet access. However, to support ubiquitous wireless service, one possibility is to integrate these narrow-range WiFi networks with a wide-range network such as WiMAX. Under this WiMAX-WiFi integrated network, how to conduct energy-efficient handovers is a critical issue. In this paper, we propose a handover scheme with geographic mobility awareness (HGMA) by considering the past handover patterns of mobile devices. HGMA can conserve the energy of handovering devices from three aspects. First, it prevents mobile devices from triggering unnecessary handovers by measuring their received signal strength and moving speeds. Second, it includes a handover candidate selection (HCS) method for mobile devices to intelligently select a subset of WiFi access points or WiMAX relay stations to be scanned. Therefore, mobile devices can reduce their network scanning and thus save their energy. Third, HGMA prefers mobile devices staying in their original WiMAX or WiFi networks. This can prevent devices from consuming too much energy on interface switching. Simulation results show that HGMA can reduce about 69% and 30% of energy consumption on network scanning and interface switching, respectively, and with 16% to 64% more probabilities for mobile devices staying in WiFi networks.

Performance analysis of vertical handover techniques based on IEEE 802.21: Media independent handover standard

“…If we increase the data rate, the device energy consumption will get high and vice versa. To deal with this trade‐off and design a scheme that optimize the energy consumption and data rate, researchers proposed several schemes 44,45 . Frequent connection with Wi‐Fi network can consume high energy because a Wi‐Fi interface requires higher energy.…”

Energy-Efficient Vertical Handover Parameters, Classification and Solutions over Wireless Heterogeneous Networks: A Comprehensive Survey

“…There have been many works proposed in the literature that focus on energy-efficient interface/network selection. These works are either network-assisted or mobile-initiated [74][75][76][77][78] and mainly utilize specific decision strategies to provide energy efficient interface/network selection, such as reputation-based [46], cost-function [47][48][49], fuzzy-logic [50,53], context-aware [52,55,58,72], location-assisted [68,69], history-based [71], etc.…”

“…Moreover, handover from WLAN to UMTS is automatically initiated once the station leaves the coverage area of a WLAN. Additionally, Yang et al in [68] and [69] propose an energy-efficient interface selection for integrated WiMAX-WLAN networks making use of the Geographic Mobility Awareness. The proposed method initiates a handover candidate selection based on historical handover geographic patterns, utilizing the RSS of the networks and the velocity of the station.…”

Impact of Propagation Environment on Energy-Efficient Relay Placement: Model and Performance Analysis

“…Since user applications mostly run on power-limited devices, reducing the energy consumption, while meeting a rate requirement, has in particular attracted significant attention. Energy minimization for relay-aided cellular networks has ignited new techniques such as relay-based handover strategies [15,16], sleep mode operations [17], improved resource management [18] and relay-aided load balancing [19]. Nevertheless, little can be found on the specific issue of energy-efficient relay placement and on the performance gains obtained by using advanced coding schemes rather than simpler schemes.…”