A Context-Aware Vertical Handover Framework Towards Energy-Efficiency

Current mobile devices are equipped with multi-standard interfaces to fully utilize both the existing and the imminent Public Land Mobile Network infrastructure. This flexibility comes with significant energy consumption overheads at the mobile terminal side and thus, the adopted interface / network selection scheme, a.k.a. Vertical Handover mechanism, should be based on both Quality of Service oriented and energy-efficiency criteria. This paper summarizes the current state of the art on energy-centric vertical handover algorithms, discusses weak aspects of existing approaches and presents a novel context-aware vertical handover framework towards energy-efficiency. Rather than a pure energy-centric vertical handover scheme, this framework is a context-awareness enabler for energy-centric vertical handover decision making.