Energy efficiency heterogeneous wireless access selection for multiple types of applications

Abstract

Mobile terminal (MT) users run various types of applications, such as e-mail, APPs, web browsers, and multimedia, through various types of wireless networks. Extending the battery life of MT, which requires a large amount of electricity for wireless transmission, has become critical. This study focused on the energy efficiency of wireless networks, such as 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi, based on application characteristics and transmission loads. The various applications are classified into idle-bound applications (e.g., e-mail service) and transmission-bound applications (e.g., multimedia) that require diverse types of wireless networks. The operation state of a wireless network includes transmitting, receiving, listening, and sleeping modes. According to the game theory of the energy consumption analysis between the characteristics of applications and wireless networks, three wireless network selection schemes IBLB (idle-bound with load-balancing), TBLB (transmission-bound with load balancing), and WLAT (weighted load and application type) were proposed to reduce the amount of power consumption. Previous studies were compared with the proposed schemes through (1) variation of the number of running applications, (2) various numbers of 3G/4G base stations and Wi-Fi access points, and (3) the combinations of various types of applications to evaluate the energy efficiency of Wi-Fi and 3G/4G access networks selections.