Terminal Battery based handover.

The Idea aims to save the battery power of the mobile terminal through scanning a reduced number of wireless networks for a low battery mobile terminal involved in Network discovery and by guaranteeing handover to a network which will consume less amount of power. The suggestion also aims to exploit clustering in which mobile terminals in the same geographical location are grouped into a cluster to further reduce the number of Discovery attempts by a mobile terminal. The algorithm assumes that the server hosts a table of the power consumption rates of the various access technologies under the coverage of the base station hence calling for each base station to have its central server to control handover in its coverage area. One way in which the server is able to know the wireless networks under its control is through the reports from the previous scans/discoveries performed by the mobile terminals. For every discovery conducted, the server updates the power consumption rate table to include new wireless networks discovered if any otherwise it maintains the hold table and assumes those are the only available networks. The mobile terminals exchange information regarding their location and the battery level status with a central server. When a mobile terminal wants to perform handover mechanism, a handover request is sent to the server together with the battery status

information and the server assesses the battery level of the terminal and maps it to the power consumption rates of the various available wireless technologies. In case the required information is available at the server end, the server forwards the information to the requesting terminal instructing it to handover to a wireless network that will match its battery level. In case there is no information on the server end, after mapping the terminal battery level with the consumption rates of the different access technologies, the server will instruct the requesting terminals to scan only networks whose power consumption rate is below a given threshold that will not drain the battery of the terminal before end of data transmission. The mobile terminal will not attempt to discover wireless networks whose power consumption cannot be met by the battery level of the mobile terminal. As the mobile terminal power decreases further, it means the number of networks that the terminal can hand over to decreases hence the scanned networks also decrease hence enabling a low power mobile terminal to spend less energy in network discovery. This power based selective scanning ensures that the mobile terminal hands over to a network with low power consumption and also decreases the number of scanned Networks hence increasing terminal battery life time. The discovery attempts are further reduced by clustering approach in which nodes of the same cluster can share the handover information.

Handover triggering Handover can be triggered based on a number of factors one of them being the power consumption rate of the current serving Wireless network. We assume the mobile terminal knows its battery level and the quantity of incoming or outgoing traffic from which it can compute the time it will take for it to complete the information exchange. Basing on the power consumption rate of the current network, the mobile terminal then assesses if it will be able to complete the data transmission or reception with its current battery level or not. In case it discovers that its battery will be drained before completion, it then triggers handover otherwise it stays on the current network. The other option of handover triggering would be just considering thresholds on power consumption irrespective of the incoming traffic. In this case, handover is triggered if the power consumption of the current network goes above a given threshold.