An application dependent and sequential scanning scheme for vertical handover management in heterogeneous wireless networks

A mobile device with multiple interfaces consumes more energy for scanning of available networks during handover compared with one having a single interface. As the number of available networks increases, the discovery and selection of an optimal network consumes much energy for scanning, therefore, reduces battery life time. To cope with such problems, we propose an energy efficient scanning scheme for vertical handover management in heterogeneous networks. The proposed scheme employs a sequential scheduling strategy to avoid unnecessary scan, and controls scanning period depending on the type of application running on a Mobile Node (MN) to speed up discovery process. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme uses less energy compared with the periodic and adaptive scanning procedures.