An energy aware mobile-controlled handover method for natural disaster situations

Abstract

Existing cellular networks and their services are not equipped enough to deal with such emergency situations that arise following natural disasters like an earthquake or tornado. Often, immediately after a natural disaster, cellular base stations (BS) in the affected areas face power outage problems and their backup power does not last long owing mostly to traffic overloading. This paper proposes a mobile station-controlled reliable target base station selection scheme for energy-aware handover in natural disaster affected areas. In this scheme, an LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) mobile station (user equipment or UE), self-selects the target base station (target evolved nodeB or TeNB) based on two independent parameters, namely, the leftover backup power of the different BSs (Evolved Node B or eNB) in affected areas and the UE's movement direction prediction. The proposed handover scheme offers three significant benefits during natural disasters. Firstly, existing connections continue to receive good QoS. Secondly, new connections are diverted to less-overloaded nearby BSs. Finally, residual battery life of BSs is considerably prolonged.