Energy-efficient Network Discovery mechanism by exploiting cooperation among terminals

Mobile terminals in modern wireless systems are equipped with multiple network interfaces to be able to discover the different available networks. Since the mobile terminal is battery powered, the energy efficiency regarding the Network Discovery (ND) process is very crucial as this process is energy demanding. In this paper, we propose a hybrid cooperative energy efficient mechanism for ND, which exploits cooperation among mobile terminals in the same geographical area in order to minimize the number of ND processes. Besides, the proposed mechanism also prevents mobile terminals from triggering unnecessary ND process by monitoring the number of the arriving packets and the received Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). Energy consumption in the proposed mechanism is compared with a non-cooperative mechanism, where a great reduction on the energy consumption (up to 95 %) is achieved as a result of the proposed cooperation among terminals.