Abstract
In future mobile networks different technologies will coexist and wireless devices with multiple interfaces will move in a heterogeneous scenario. The capability to connect to different access radio technologies opens the way to vertical handover mechanisms. Then, allowing vertical handovers with low losses and costs will be a main requirement of future mobile networks. In this paper, we apply batched sparse (BATS) codes on hard vertical handovers to avoid packet losses due to erasures. The theoretical analysis shows that energy consumption per bit increases while BATS codes are used. In particular, the energy consumption per bit inversely grows with the size of the finite field of the code. © 2013 IEEE.