Modeling the Energy Consumption of Multi-NIC Communication Mechanisms

This paper introduces a theoretical model of the Always Best Packet Switching (ABPS) communication mechanism, a novel mechanism for wireless communications we have developed in order to enable mobile nodes, equipped with multiple network interface cards (NICs), to determine dynamically the most appropriate NIC to use as single point of access to the Internet. Using ABPS, a mobile node can seamlessly switch to another NIC, based on the performance of the NIC currently in use, in order to get better performance. ABPS supports dynamic NIC switching without causing communication interruptions at the application level. We use Markov reward models to efficiently estimate the availability and power consumption of ABPS, SIP-based mechanisms and conventional connection-oriented protocols employing a single NIC.