Paging Issues and Methods for Multiaccess

(Invited Paper)
Haitao Tang1, Petteri Pyhnen1, Ove Strandberg1, Kostas Pentikousis2 Joachim Sachs3, Francesco Meago1, Janne Tuononen1, Ramon Aguero4
1

Nokia Siemens Networks, 2VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland 3 Ericsson Research, 4University of Cantabria
run out of its power quite soon, e.g. every a few hours. This would lead to terrible end user experience due to frequent recharging needs. Hence it becomes clear that this type of usage scenario will not be practical, and operating optimally a battery-powered multiaccess device without sacrificing reachability and connectivity becomes one of the key issues to be solved in this new environment. Although in this paper we consider RAT-related issues only, the problem itself is, of course, much wider including how to save power with other peripherals in a mobile device like a screen. Radio access technologies (RATs) for mobile hand-held devices are typically designed to support certain built-in power saving capabilities. Some provide more effective power saving schemes than others (cf. cellular technologies GSM and UMTS vs. WLAN; see Section II). When multiple RATs are put into a battery-powered multiaccess device, their combined energy consumption becomes a significant factor and power saving becomes an important problem that needs to be solved. The problem becomes even more interesting since the power saving solution for a multiaccess device needs to work with the holistic view for various RATs coexisting in the same device, where some of them have their own power saving functions while others do not. If we could effectively reduce the power consumption of the radio accesses without sacrificing reachability and connectivity whenever there is no data flow over their links, battery lifetime could increase significantly. Therefore, even in the sense of saving power, a multiaccess paging function is needed for the multiaccess environment [13]. But, what constitutes multiaccess paging? How is a specific multiaccess paging scheme defined? How should a paging scheme be applied to a multiaccess environment? How much battery power would a multiaccess paging scheme save? These are the questions this work attempts to answer. There are several issues to consider for each multiaccess paging scheme, such as, for example, scalability, security, reliability and cost-efficiency. We need also to check if the scheme supports the coexistence of both radio accesses with and without their own paging functions. It should benefit radio accesses without their own paging functions thus providing further power savings in the multiaccess environment. The paper is organized as follows. Section II presents related work and Section III details paging issues in multiaccess environment. In Section IV, we propose two multiaccess pag-

Abstract- Battery-powered multiaccess devices, with their increased flexibility and reachability, are becoming common. Such devices would have to disassociate their radio accesses from the surrounding networks whenever they are left unused, in order to address battery lifetime limitations. In single-access networks, paging has been proven an effective method for minimizing power consumption. In a heterogeneous multiaccess environment, a paging function may be even more important in extending battery lifetimes. This study investigates the issues at hand, presents related work, analyzes the paging issues in multiaccess scenarios, and proposes two multiaccess paging schemes, which utilize (but do not replace) existing paging functions in access technologies as a foundation to realize multiaccess paging. We further specify how to realize multiaccess paging in Ambient Networks, and present numerical analysis results on the different degrees of battery lifetime savings under different communication, network and device use settings. Keywords- Paging, multiaccess, power management, battery lifetime

I. INTRODUCTION Today, mobile phones and other hand-held communication devices are often equipped with two or more access technologies for accessing communication networks. The access technologies may be wireless access technologies such as Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), Wireless LAN (WLAN), as well as any future wireless access technology. We refer to these devices as multiaccess devices and we expect them to be very popular due to their improved flexibility and reachability. Ideally, a multiaccess device would always have all its radio accesses actively associated with all surrounding networks. It could thus dynamically and freely use one or more of the always-available active accesses to support a given communication session according to the related communication preferences, such as, application type, access price etc. However, it is difficult to reach this ideal situation due the problem all mobile devices face: limited battery lifetime. Imagine that we have a battery-powered multiaccess device that needs to maintain multiple active radio accesses simultaneously. According to the capacities offered by modern battery technologies, the battery of a multiaccess device would

ing schemes for different purposes. In Section V, we study how to realize multiaccess paging for ambient networks. In Section VI, we investigate the amount of battery lifetime saved by the proposed multiaccess paging schemes under a given case. Sections VII-VIII conclude this paper. II. RELATED WORK This section briefly surveys recent results in three distinct, but closely inter-related areas, namely, multiaccess, energy consumption and power saving, and paging. A. Multiaccess Multiaccess networks, both stationary and mobile, are currently a very active research area. We recently investigated different handover strategies for multiaccess networks emphasizing on finding the optimal mobile terminal allocation that maximizes network resource utilization [4][5]. Corujo et al. [6] show the impact of signaling timing issues over networkcontrolled handovers when combining L2 and L3 information to improve handover execution procedures between 3G and WLAN networks. Wu et al. [7] study mainly 3G and WLAN scenarios, considering pure mobility solutions but not attempting to optimize the way of handovers. Unfortunately, although these papers provide great insights into the issues related to multiaccess, they do not address energy consumption per se. Given that the majority of mobile and portable devices operate using a fixed-size power source (typically rechargeable) for accessing wireless networks, it is crucial to address the problem of how to make the most out of the multiaccess capability while limiting battery power consumption. B. Energy Consumption and Power Saving Power consumption is a critical issue for battery-powered devices such as notebooks, PDAs and cell phones. Typically, communicating over a wireless medium consumes more battery power than CPU processing [8], and a lot of efforts have been spent for designing energy efficient physical and MAC layer protocols. In particular, several power-efficient MAC layer protocols have been proposed and, in general, every effort is made to make the physical layer as energy efficient as possible. For example, WLAN standards (such as the IEEE 802.11 family of protocols), EDGE, HSPA, and CDMA2000 1xEV-DO [9][10][11] wide area wireless data networks employ rate adaptation to achieve the highest possible raw bit rates at the most economical power level for a specific level of interference. In short, when researchers consider different ways to save power in a single-interface wireless mobile device, the common remedies used are to adjust the transmission power and to employ power save ( sleep ) modes. Xiao et al. [12] propose a mechanism to adjust the device working mode based on its associated network activity/load. A similar mechanism is introduced in [13] where the device s packet queues are used to make a power management decisions like switching on and off the display. Another way to save power is introduced in [14], where radio channel allocations are ad-

justed dynamically to optimize capacity and power consumption. Nevertheless, the design of energy efficient MAC and physical layer protocols is not coordinated with the design of power conserving transport or application layer protocols. As a result, many features that were meant to be power conserving prove not to be so or, even worse, in that they may even hurt performance and lead to a less than adequate user experience. For example, Krashinsky and Balakrishnan [15] demonstrate that when the IEEE 802.11 Power Saving Mode (PSV) is employed, users issuing web-like request/replies experience unjustified long delays. In effect, PSV, a MAC layer mechanism, was introduced without considering the anticipated application workloads or the transport layer mechanisms, and thus can fail to deliver energy savings while maintaining reasonable performance. Moreover, as mentioned in the previous section, when we consider multiaccess devices, we need to consider how to coordinate which interface to use and when the energy profile of a device would play a major role. It is important to note that energy efficiency does not depend solely on the amount of avoidable data retransmission, for example. For batteryoperated devices, power consumption not only depends on the amount of data sent and received, but also on the total duration of a connection, the transmission patterns, the time spent with all network interfaces on , and the battery recovery effects. We therefore argue that multiaccess paging can play a critical role in coordinating multiaccess transmission and could allow mobile devices to make the most out of their fixed-size power source. We survey paging-related work in the next subsection to set the stage for the solutions we are considering. C. Paging Mobile cellular networks use the paging operation to request mobile devices that might be in idle mode to update their location information and to switch to the connected mode. Paging also makes it possible to further reduce power consumption in mobile devices because they can switch to the idle mode [16] when there is no imminent need for data transmission. In idle mode, mobile devices cannot send or receive user traffic data, thus they can only monitor downlink channel(s) such as the Paging Channel (PCH) in [17] over which they can be paged, for example, due to an incoming connection request. One of the main differences between radio technologies supporting paging is how the PCH or corresponding downlink channel is implemented according to radio access frame design. Paging is typically done based on paging areasconsisting of one or more access points/base stations. In mobile cellular architectures, such as, 3rd Generation Partnership Program (3GPP) networks (Release 7), paging supports additional power saving in the idle mode through a discontinuous reception of paging messages. In other words, a mobile device does not need to monitor all incoming paging indicators, thus this monitoring is done periodically based on the defined cycle.

III. PAGING IN A MULTIACCESS ENVIRONMENT Among the existing radio access technologies (RATs) paging is typically supported on those having so called core network functions. Such RATs are, for example, all 3GPP systems and the WiMAX system. On the other hand, coreless RATs, like WLANs, do not typically support paging even though they may have power-saving modes for their radio. The reason for this is simply that coreless RATs were not designed for power-consumption critical hand-held terminals. For instance, WLAN was designed to be more like a wireless extension for wired stationary nodes to help with reducing the amount of cabling and provide very short range mobility within one access point. In the multiaccess environment, efficient battery usage demands that power consumption is minimized for radio usage, while we would use multiaccess environment to provide possibly better end user reachability using several RATs. In the average use case, today s cellular phone is mostly in the idle mode due to the fact that there are not many other things to do with the terminal except to make and receive phone calls. Increasingly, however, there will be more diversity in the communication patterns and mobile services. But even then, radio interfaces would very frequently use the power-saving mode and hence paging would be still required for most of the incoming service requests to the terminal. Actually, we expect that larger supply of services would turn into increased number of paging requests. A terminal will not be paged only for voice calls, but also for other services such as chat and instant messaging. We should not forget that once terminals start to host services, the amount of paging requests might increase further. In such an environment, efficient and battery-friendly paging is not feasible by solely using the existing single-radio paging mechanisms independently. Another issue is that paging today is typically only incorporated for a specific mobility scheme. The inclusion of heterogeneous mobility schemes into a common paging environment (where the paging is not tied to a specific radio) is missing. Therefore a new approach for a common paging environment is required, where paging is not tied to a specific radio access but exploits the full potential of a multiaccess environment. This new generic multiaccess paging function should be designed to take advantage of existing paging mechanisms implemented by each of the underlying RATs as a tool when making multiaccess paging. In other words, different radios should cooperate providing paging for each other including RATs that do not specify paging functions themselves. Next, two different concepts for multiaccess paging using existing single-radio paging functions are introduced. IV. PAGING APPROACHES FOR MULTIACCESS This section studies what would constitute a paging approach for multiaccess. It proposes and presents two types of multiaccess paging approaches: registration-based paging and non-registration-based/registration-free paging.

The registration-based approach requires proactive updates of the device's paging location and capability to the common paging center in the network. In this type of approach, it is essential that multiaccess mobile devices maintain their device specific information like status information in the corresponding mobile cellular networks, for example, based on registration and periodic update procedures. The non-registrationbased approach does not require any proactive registration of that information. Here, non-registrationmeans that there is no need for a multiaccess mobile device to report any of its capability and status information to the corresponding multiaccess networks for registration so that it can be paged. The common paging center needs only very limited information on the device. In this scheme, the device does not register and update its information to the common paging center itself. Rather, the common paging center infers possible paging locations by considering the device s recent access of any of the associated networks (wireless or wired) under the common paging center and the device s latest geographical location. Usage information may include data related to node identifier [18] and time of discovery. It is reported to the common paging center by an access network or a server over the network. It is important to highlight that the common paging center fulfils the multiaccess paging by using all the available RATspecific paging schemes as its tools. The common paging center and the multiaccess paging are not supposed to replace any RAT-specific paging. A. Registration Based Selective Paging Scheme The registration-based selective paging (RBSP) scheme defines a model by which the paging can be done to support global reachability in heterogeneous multiaccess environments independently of the particular radio access network architecture. In this scheme, the paging functionality is not coupled with a specific RAT. It is thus independent of the type of RAT used for paging, which does not necessarily coincide with the RAT to be enabled as a result of the paging. Figure 1 illustrates a block diagram of heterogeneous multiaccess networks. In this networking environment, the Mobile Anchor Point (MAP) provides a (global) Layer 3 reachability for a user s Mobile Node (MN). A paging center resides at the core network of one or more cooperating operators and it represents the mobile node in the network side. The paging center is aware of the MN s capabilities, preferences and status. For example, the MN has its radio interfaces setup as follows: RAT1 is active, RAT2 is in idle mode, and RAT3 is disabled. The paging center represents the MN during the selective paging process when the network side selects the most appropriate access network over which the paging is then performed. For instance, during this process the network may use the type and characteristics of an incoming traffic to select the most appropriate RAT for the paging in order to avoid unnecessary radio interface activations in a mobile device. In Figure 1, MAP is triggered by an incoming data packet destined to the user s MN (message 1). After this, MAP con-

tacts the paging center and requests the activation of one or more of the MN s radio accesses according to pertinent preferences, policies, and status (message 2). Additionally, MAP can provide trigger information such as the traffic type of a received data packet destined to the MN. The paging center is aware of MN s current state like active radio access (RAT1) and the initialpaging is done via this RAT (message 3) in order to notify the MN of the new communication session. Additionally, the MN may be asked to provide up-to-date location information. The MN replies back to the paging center (message 4) providing all required information, including its current location information. The network-side functionality evaluates all MN s radio accesses and hence the paging center contacts the corresponding core network (concerning RAT3) to request its current coverage map (message 5). This map and the MN s up-to-date location information are then used to find whether the MN is potentially in a coverage area. As a result of this evaluation process, RAT2 is discovered to be a potential candidate access for a new communication session. The paging center requests the core network to page the MN (message 6) via RAT2. Once the MN has been paged, the MN activates its RAT2 radio interface and proceeds to switch it to the connected mode. If the MN does not need its RAT1 connectivity anymore, it can either disable RAT1 or move RAT1 to the idle mode. Because the MN s locator (e.g. IP address) changes due to the deployment of a new RAT, it updates its address information at the MAP, e.g. by sending a binding update in Mobile IP (message 7). Finally, MAP is able to forward a received and buffered data packet to the MN over RAT2 (message 8).

resides in a core network owned by a single operator or a group of network (cooperating) operators. In addition to the core network, the network comprises three access networks, a GSM network, a WLAN network, and a RATx network for interfacing with the multiaccess devices. The RAT x network can be any suitable access network. The multiaccess device B is a communication device that includes capabilities for communicating through all three access networks. Application A can be one of the several possible entities. For example, application A can be a network function, which has detected that someone is trying to contact the multiaccess device B and that multiaccess device B is not located in the previously known network destination anymore. Note that application A may actually be either a component of a certain paging function of the network, a network service, or an application running on behalf of another user trying to contact the communication device. Other alternatives are possible as well. In this example, application A is the calling application , i.e., the application that is trying to contact the multiaccess device B. Additionally, the paging center could support multiple operators according to their business/technical agreements; this scheme is not limited to a single operator network.

Figure 2: Registration-free paging example diagram.

Figure 1: Registration-based selective paging example diagram.

B. Registration-Free Paging Scheme We use Figure 2 to explain the registration-free paging (RFP) scheme for multiaccess networks and devices. It shows a block diagram of multiaccess networks with an application A, a multiaccess device B, and a paging center. The paging center

Assume now that application A initiates communication with the multiaccess device B and it has no up-to-date information on the network location of multiaccess device B. Application A starts by using the paging center (message 1). The paging center has no knowledge of the capabilities and status of multiaccess device B since it has not reported any of the information to the paging center, as would have been the case with the RBSP scheme. The paging center has thus to send a paging message to multiaccess device B through the paging center s own pre-selected access networks using the associated RATspecific paging function. Messages 2a and 2b depict paging messages through the GSM network and through the RATx

network, respectively. Messages 2a and 2b are alternatives and both of them may be used one after the other. If the multiaccess device cannot be reached through the first pre-selected access network, the paging center may iteratively send the paging message through the remaining available access networks until multiaccess device B answers or the available access networks are exhausted. Assume that the multiaccess device B receives the paging message for example through the GSM network and it starts to evaluate the available access networks of various access technologies (in this case, GSM, WLAN and RAT x) possibly in co-operation with the associated network as indicated by messages 3a-3c. Note that it is not mandatory to evaluate all available access networks. In some cases only a subset of all available access networks may be evaluated. Multiaccess device B and/or the associated network select the suitable access network for the desired connection (this may depend on the calling application in addition to available network resources). The selection does not need to be an autonomous decision by either the multiaccess device B or the network. Instead, both of them may take a joint decision (see [4][5] for more details on a proposal on how to achieve this). Moreover, it is possible that in some cases an actual evaluation of access networks is not performed, if sufficient information is otherwise available for selecting the access network as the desired connection. Multiaccess device B then activates the association with the selected access network and responds to the paging message through the selected access network. In this example the selected access network is the WLAN and message 4 depicts the response. The paging center replies to application A, informing how to contact multiaccess device B (message 5). Optionally, if the application A is located outside the operator network, the paging center may setup the operator s middle boxes (such Network Address Translators- NATs and firewalls) for the anticipated communication session allowing application A to communicate directly with the multiaccess device B. Application A will then be able to establish communication with multiaccess device B (message 6). Alternatively, the connection between the communication device and the paging center may be dedicated to paging, whereby a new connection is established between the application A and multiaccess device B. V. MULTIACCESS PAGING FOR AMBIENT NETWORKS Ambient Networks (AN) defines the Ambient Control Space (ACS), which is responsible for coordinating different networks and their accesses [19]. The ACS relies on power saving schemes (e.g. paging and other mobility-related mechanisms) of specific connectivity layers. Otherwise, the ACS cannot by itself do much. It is therefore foreseeable that when a device is in a power saving mode, access selection towards a proper connectivity layer may be triggered as explained next. A. Multiaccess Paging Signaling in Ambient Networks The ACS has the capability to handle discovery and advertising across both Ambient Network Interface (ANI) and Am-

bient Resource Interface (ARI). Assume user AN1 has multiple access technologies, all currently in power save mode and that, in addition, it is is idle under coverage of multi-access network AN2, while AN3 is willing to know the current AN1 locator through AN2 (see Figure 3). AN3 pages AN1, by sending an ANI Discovery message to AN2, which then pages AN1 through an ARI Discovery message through AN2 Ambient Connectivity (ACY). In turn, AN2 ACY issues an ACY paging message towards AN1, on a technology selected either by the AN2 ACS in the previous message, or by the same AN2 ACY. AN1 might reply to AN2 via a paging response through the same or another access with the required locator, which goes all the way back to AN3, through ARI and ANI Advertising messages functioning as ARI and ANI paging responses.
A R I A N I

AN1 ACY

AN2 ACY

AN2 ACS

AN3 ACS

2 : ARI Discovery() 3 : ACY Paging() 4 : ACY Paging Resp() 5 : ARI Advertising()

1 : ANI Discovery()

6 : ANI Advertising()

Figure 3: Paging signaling in Ambient Networks.

B. Requirements of Multiaccess Paging on the Access Sets of Ambient Networks In multiaccess networks a key function is to select the access to be used for a data session, or service data flow. This kind of access selection, based on Multi-Radio Resource Management (MRRM), has been studied extensively in [20-26]. These access selection approaches are based on the assumption that connectivity is established to available access networks and thus the mobile node is always reachable. Multiaccess paging methods need to extend this scheme to the cases when a mobile node is disconnected from some of the available accesses, or only connected through a battery-saving idle mode. For the multi-radio resource management, certain sets (see e.g. [26]) are used to maintain information about available accesses and evaluate them. Figure 4 depicts these access sets for a mobile node. Via scanning, the MN determines the Detected Set (DS), which is filtered according to network and user policies. The resulting Validated Set (VS) contains the usable accesses of the MN (without considering particular necessities from the application). For a service data flow, the accesses which provide sufficient capabilities according to the service requirements are determined in the Candidate Set (CS); from this the best-suited (collection of) access(es) is se-

lected and maintained with the Active Set (AS). If multiaccess paging is considered, then these sets need to be extended with additional information to support idle and disconnected modes. For accesses contained in the DS, VS and CS, this information is the connectivity state, which describes if the access is disconnected, idle, or active. In this sense, a MN can only be reached from the network via active or idle accesses. Furthermore, the idle connectivity state is reserved for access technologies, which support RAT-specific paging methods.
Multi-Access data base Scanning Hints

Scanning Set

User / Network Policies

Expected Set
User Location / Mobility

Scanning

Detected Set

User / Network Policies

Validated Set

Service Data Flow 1

Requirements

Service Data Flow n

Requirements

Candidate Set
Dynamic access characteristics

Candidate Set
Dynamic access characteristics

Active Set

Active Set

Figure 4: Access sets of ambient networks.

In order to ease the burden for mobile nodes to scan for available accesses, two additional access sets are introduced. The Expected Set (ES) of accesses contains accesses that a MN has not detected, but they are expected to be within its coverage area and thus would be soon detected. The ES is determined based on multiaccess cell-neighbor information, or on coverage maps, in combination with the MN location. The Scanning Set (SS) is determined as a subset of the ES, for which the MN is directed to start scanning. This procedure enables the multiaccess paging function to initiate the establishment of connectivity via another access than the one which is being used for the paging commands. VI. NUMERICAL ANALYSIS OF USAGE AND TRAFFIC EFFECTS ON MULTIACCESS PAGING The results presented in this section focus on the battery lifetime saved by a multiaccess paging scheme under different device usage and traffic. Other important aspects such as paging signaling costs, paging response delay, and paging failure rate are not dealt with in this paper, but are part of our ongoing work. A. Simulation Model and Settings To investigate the gains of the battery lifetime by the proposed registration-free paging scheme (RFP), we use the multiaccess environment similar to that shown in Figure 2, where the network RATx is UMTS. The WLAN is not part of the UMTS network, although being part of the multiaccess networks managed by a group of operators in cooperation. The multiaccess devices in the simulation have the access capabili-

ties of GSM, UMTS, and WLAN correspondingly. GSM, albeit a 2G technology, could actually be the best candidate for delivering the paging signals due to its lower power consumption and wide coverage. Concerning battery lifetime savings, both GSM and UMTS support the idle mode during which mobile devices could save power and still be reachable through paging, while WLAN has no corresponding mode. In fact, WLAN has the following modes: constantly awake mode, power save mode, and not associated (idle) mode. When there is no data being sent over the WLAN radio channel, the most effective way to save the battery lifetime would be to detach the WLAN association between the multiaccess devices and the WLAN access network. Thus, we compare the power consumptions of the two following cases. Case 1: Whenever there is no data sent between the multiaccess device and the multiaccess networks, only the GSM or UMTS RAT of the multiaccess device are waiting for paging, while the WLAN of the device is detached from the WLAN access network. In Case 2, whenever there is no data sent between the device and the multiaccess networks, GSM or UMTS of the multiaccess device is waiting for paging while the WLAN of the device is in the power save mode. We assume the following power consumptions when there are data actively sent over the radio links: UMTS consumes an average of 170 mA when considering both dedicated channel and the shared channel. Since GSM is only used for paging purpose, it consumes an average of 4 mA. When UMTS is in the idle mode, it consumes an average of 4 mA as well. When WLAN is in the constantly awake mode, it consumes an average of 25 mA, which drops to 12 mA, when it is in power saving mode. We assume various Poisson session arrivals and their corresponding lifetimes. We also assume the various power-saving times that the multiaccess devices should wait before turning from the active data state into the power saving states of Case 1 and 2, when there is no active data sent between the multiaccess devices and the multiaccess networks. Given the limited setting and problem scope, the results should be applicable to both the registration based selective paging scheme and the registration free paging scheme, while the actual simulation results reported below were obtained using the registration free paging scheme only. B. Results Our simulation results show that the battery lifetime is mainly affected by the call/session arrival rate and the active call/session lifetime. Different values of them bring about significantly different savings of the battery lifetime. On the other hand, the results show that we could have a wide time range to wait before putting a multiaccess device into the power saving states such as the paging and detached modes, when there is no data transmission over radio links between the multiaccess device and the multiaccess networks. We will refer to this waiting time as go-idletime. The results show

the saving of battery lifetime reduces rather slowly when this go-idletime increases in the range of 1 - 10 seconds, while clear drop of the saving is shown, e.g., when go-idle time reaches 300 seconds (Figure 5). As shown in Figures 5 and 6, the savings in battery lifetime decrease with the increase of the active session duration and the decrease of the session inter-arrival duration. The battery consumption difference when comparing Cases 1 and 2 becomes less relevant when the data communication between the multiaccess device and the multiaccess networks occurs more frequently, i.e., when the multiaccess device is heavily used.

drop exponentially when the active session lifetime further increases. In this heavy usage scenario, there is not much improvement in the battery lifetime, while there is the delay cost to re-attach to the WLAN access point. Therefore, a multiaccess device should not use the WLAN detachment in the multiaccess device to increase its battery lifetime when the device is heavily used. Fortunately, statistics indicate that most of the multiaccess device users (let us call them typical users ) have certain long session arrival intervals, for example, larger than 5 minutes. Therefore, our results indicate that WLAN detachment can significantly extend the battery lifetime, for typical users at least, and multiaccess devices should enable WLAN detachment, so as to increase battery lifetime in the multiaccess device when the communication usage of the device is not heavy , e.g., there is no new session/call coming every few minutes. It is obvious that paging functions for the cellular accesses must be enabled in all multiaccess devices when there is no data to send. Significant energy consumption will be saved by putting the cellular radio association into the idle mode whenever there is no data sent for a given time. VII. DISCUSSION Multiaccess paging solutions should naturally work in a heterogeneous networking environment. These solutions must be generic and (at least in theory) work with any combination of RATs. Security is an important issue in a single-operator multiaccess environment, but it will be even more challenging problem in a multi-operator environment, where one needs to answer how to provide security and trust in said environment. Right behind the security issue comes scalability and how to make a multiaccess paging system operate with reliability, low-cost, and efficiency in a global scope. Therefore it is a safe to assume that multiaccess paging will be first introduced in a single operator multiaccess network and will then be expanded to a group of cooperating operators (for example, a roaming coalition) providing several RATs, because the scope and security in those are still manageable. As an impact to telecom operator business, multiaccess paging would allow operators in the future to sell a reachability serviceper se, either directly to the user or within a coalition of operators in multi-operator environment. One of today s cellular operators may hold a dominant role within a coalition of access providers including local access providers just because of its reachability service. We should never forget that one of the critical factors that determined the success of GSM and other cellular communications was and still is reachability. Reachability is not only necessary to implement mobility, i.e. finding a person to establish a communication session. Reachability services provided by cellular networks have been improving everyday life aspects, such as personal safety and freedom of movement while being always reachable. That is why reachability is a service that pays off, much more than broadband connectivity

Figure 5: The extra battery life saving (mAH) by Case 1 comparing with that of Case 2, when the go-idletime = 300 seconds.

Figure 6: The extra battery life saving (mAH) by Case 1 comparing with that of Case2, when the go-idletime = 10 seconds.

When the average session arrival interval is large, the savings in battery power consumption are not affected significantly by the active session duration. However, when the average session arrival interval is decreased, the savings are clearly affected by the active session lifetime. The savings

itself. There would be other potential economical benefits from multiaccess paging, even for the end users. For example, the multiaccess paging might be used to reduce the communication bill of the user s desktop if the price is based on communication time. These, however, are beyond the scope of this work. VIII. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK A multiaccess paging function is needed to effectively extend the battery lifetime of mobile wireless multiaccess devices. Different multiaccess paging schemes can be designed addressing different objectives. It is usually necessary to turn the radio associations in the multiaccess environment into power saving modes whenever there is no data transmission or reception. Our numerical analysis results show that, when a multiaccess device has both the radio accesses with paging functions and the radio accesses without paging functions at the same time, the power saving of the radio accesses without the paging functions could be further benefited from the paging functions of the other radio accesses through the multiaccess paging scheme. As an example, we have realized a multiaccess paging function in Ambient Networks. We expect that other multiaccess networks can also utilize a multiaccess paging scheme in a similar manner. Furthermore, it looks that multiaccess paging has wider implications than that of saving battery lifetime. For example, an operator or group of operators with global or wide-area network coverage could provide a new service, providing reachability. In future work, we will further analyze the performance of multiaccess paging schemes, e.g., on their paging response delay under a given failure rate limitation. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work has been carried out in the framework of the Ambient Networks project (IST 027662), which is partially funded by the Commission of the European Union. The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of their employers, the Ambient Networks project, or the Commission of the European Union. The comments and ideas from people involved in the project's multiaccess and mobility research are gratefully acknowledged. The authors greatly appreciate and would like to thank the CHINACOM committees for their kind invitation to present this work. REFERENCES
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