Towards an Energy-Aware Network Activation Strategy for Multi-Homed Mobile Devices

Simultaneous operation of multiple network interfaces can benefit mobile devices with diverse network interfaces. This paper outlines an IP-level network activation strategy that aims at optimum use of the complementary features of the underlying networks. A key design issue in such strategies is the energy cost of different network interfaces. As a step towards validating and fine-tuning our strategy, we devised an experimental setting to measure the relative energy consumption of WiFi and GPRS interfaces in two modern mobile devices. The paper reports the experimental method and results. Our study indicates that the proposed strategy –in this case, reaching devices from the GPRS interface and, whenever appropriate, handing over some sessions to the WiFi interface– is plausible from energy consumption viewpoint and in some cases it outperforms the existing methods. The energy consumption model obtained will be used to make the network activation strategy energy aware. Key words—Mobile devices, multiple network interfaces, connectivity management, energy cost, WiFi-GPRS.