Power-optimized vertical handover scheme for heterogeneous wireless networks

This letter proposes a vertical handover scheme to minimize the total power consumption required in serving a traffic flow, while guaranteeing a particular service rate of different access networks. The proposed scheme is based on a Markov decision process (MDP) that uniquely captures the power consumption during the vertical handover execution as well as the transmission power and circuit power. Our scheme is capable of handling stochastic system behaviors while finding an optimal decision policy. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can lead to a lower total power consumption compared to several existing schemes. For a special case where each traffic flow has a fixed number of frames, our results suggest that the number of decision epochs can be reduced to further conserve power.