Enhanced MIH (media independent handover) for collaborative green wireless communications

In this paper, we address the issue of energy saving in wireless communication networks; a special interest is given to heterogeneous networks (HetNets) which are supposed to be the key feature of the future communication networks, namely, the 5G cellular networks [1]. In a HetNet, different communication technologies coexist; with the use of vertical handovers, the users could switch between the different operating ones. Our work aims to make the used protocols for vertical handover collaborative, in such a way to reduce the overall network energy consumption. Our study is based on Media Independent Handover (MIH) protocol [2]. We bring modifications into this later for energy saving purposes in order to create a green collaborative MIH protocol. The proposed enhancements on MIH protocol allow gathering detailed information about network state and using them as statistics and indicators to manage network density according to traffic load and users location. Our experiments are performed using NS2.29 with National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) add-on which implements the MIH protocol (802.21). By comparing the results while using our proposed contribution and the conventional MIH protocol, we can see that the modifications done allow a significant improvement in terms of energy saving while maintaining reliability. Copyright (C) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.