Energy Considerations for a Wireless Multi-homed Environment

Internet wireless access technologies are increasingly heterogeneous. The main cause of this heterogeneity is that, up to now, no wireless technology has succeeded in widely conquering themarket. Nowadays, different access technologies co-exist in the same environment allowing multi-homed users to improve their experience by exploiting all available wireless interfaces. However, the energy cost of simultaneously using several wireless interfaces can dramatically drain out mobile devices batteries. In this paper, we review the major work on wireless interfaces energy efficiency (i.e., WLAN and 3G) by highlighting the differences of the proposed energy models and the hardware power consumption. In addition, we present some energy consumption measurements for different application flows and discuss the integration of energy considerations into a general interface selection algorithm.