An Energy-Efficient Interface Selection Scheme For Multi-Mode Wireless Network Devices

Power management is an important issue in mobile wireless network devices with multiple network communication interfaces, as most mobile wireless network devices are battery-operated. Therefore, it is important to reduce the energy consumption to maximize the lifetime. In this paper, we analyze the energy consumption of network devices according to the variation of the network detection interval. We obtain the optimal network detection interval using a probabilistic analysis according to the state transition rate of networks and the energy consumption of network interfaces. Finally, we propose a heuristic network detection scheme that dynamically adjusts the network detection interval to reduce the amount of energy consumed. With the proposed scheme, we can reduce the energy consumption of network devices. We evaluated our scheme in a simulation. The simulation results show that the energy consumption of our scheme is nearly identical to of an optimal scheme under certain conditions.