A Handover Policy for Energy Efficient Network Connectivity through Proportionally Fair Access

The ever increasing demand for ubiquitous wireless connectivity and the inherently limited power resources at mobile devices highlight the need for an energy efficient operation of these devices. The paper addresses this need by means of an appropriate handover policy. According to it, a handover is initiated whenever the energy efficiency of the user equipment falls below a given threshold. The handover target is selected among the candidates so as to maximize the achievable energy efficiency. For networks employing Proportionally Fair access, it is shown that the achievable energy efficiency can be calculated by means of a simple expression, requiring only a limited amount of network and terminal status information. In particular, no network load status is required. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed handover policy can lead to a significantly improved (up to 15%) energy efficiency without compromising throughput performance.