As wireless communications evolve towards heterogeneous networks, mobile terminals have been enabled to handover seamlessly from one network to another. At the same time, the continuous increase in the terminal power consumption has resulted in an ever-decreasing battery lifetime. To that end, the network selection is expected to play a key role on how to minimize the energy consumption, and thus to extend the terminal lifetime. Hitherto, terminals select the network that provides the highest received power. However, it has been proved that this solution does not provide the highest energy efficiency. Thus, this paper proposes an energy efficient vertical handover algorithm that selects the most energy efficient network that minimizes the uplink power consumption. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated through extensive simulations and it is shown to achieve high energy efficiency gains compared to the conventional approach.

Peer Reviewed