History-based Network Selection in Heterogeneous Wireless Multimedia Networks

Abstract

One of the most important tasks of the wireless terminals in heterogeneous wireless environments is selecting the best available network based on the quality of services. Considering the fact that multimedia applications are known to be high energy consumers and since the battery lifetime is an important factor for mobile users, multimedia wireless communication is the most challenging issue in the network selection. Enhanced power-friendly access network selection (E-POFANS) has been introduced to maintain an acceptable user perceived quality by selecting the network that consumes minimum energy. In this paper, to improve E-POFANS, the networks' behavior in the past is considered as a metric for network selection. Also, a mechanism to monitor the energy consumption of the mobile device is devised to guarantee that the multimedia stream is played the whole lot before the battery lifetime is finished. This solution achieves about 29% energy saving in comparison with E-POFANS. Through different simulations, we show that the proposed solutions improve the energy consumption and user's throughput, considerably.