Energy-Efficiency Media Independent Handover Mechanism

Nowadays with the development of wireless communication technology, current User End (UE) in mobile system could access different kinds of network with different Network Interface Cards (NICs). Energy-efficiency media independent handover is needed to support the converting between NICs and save the energy of UE. The decision of media independent handover has directly effect on the performance of the service, lifetime of the battery and user satisfaction. In this paper, we propose a new energy-efficiency media independent handover mechanism which makes the handover decision based on multi-criteria. The Energy- Efficiency Media Independent Handover Mechanism (EMIH) consists of two mechanisms: application classification and handover decision. By using these two mechanisms, we achieve the goals of energy-efficiency handover and satisfying the user´s requirement. EMIH identifies Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) Access Points (APs) without turning the WLAN NIC on and it also consider about the energy cost of the converting between different NIC so as to avoid the ping-pong effect. The simulation results show the proposed EMIH reduces the amount of exchanged messages so it save the energy of UE and prolong the battery lifetime.