Exploiting short-range cooperation for energy efficient vertical handover operations

Abstract

The availability of multiple collocated wireless networks using heterogeneous technologies and the multi-access support of contemporary mobile devices have allowed wireless connectivity optimization, enabled through vertical handover (VHO) operations. However, this comes at a high energy consumption on the mobile device, due to the inherently expensive nature of some of the involved operations. This work proposes exploiting short-range cooperation among collocated mobile devices to improve the energy efficiency of vertical handover operations. The proactive exchange of handover-related information through lowenergy short-range communication technologies, like Bluetooth, can help in eliminating expensive signaling steps when the need for a VHO arises. A model is developed for capturing the mean energy expenditure of such an optimized VHO scheme in terms of relevant factors by means of closed-form expressions. This model is validated through simulations and results demonstrate that the proposed scheme has superior performance in several realistic usage scenarios considering important relevant factors, including network availability, the local density of mobile devices and the range of the cooperation technology.

Short‐Range Cooperation of Mobile Devices for Energy‐Efficient Vertical Handovers

“…As mentioned in the previous section after (12), the improvement to the energy consumption-related costs offered by the cooperation-assisted mechanism is expressed through the factor (1− ). Thus, we investigate the effects associated with various realistic scenarios by means of the corresponding forms for the generator (9).…”

“…It is mentioned that this article is a significantly extended and enhanced version of the conference paper in [12]. The journal version provides several new contributions, including the formal treatment of typical usage scenarios and a discussion of additional insights arising from it, the extensive investigation of cost/benefit trade-offs related to the cooperation mechanism, and a consideration of protocol implementation aspects.…”