Wireless access technologies have been extensively developed aiming to give users the ability to connect totheir expected networks anytime, anywhere. This leads to an increment of the number of wireless interfacesintegrated into a single mobile device, hence, it allows the device to be able to connect to multiple accessnetworks. However, in some specific cases such as natural disasters, having an uncorrupted and timelyinformation exchanging means is critical for affected victims to survive or to connect to the outside world.This is because the essential network infrastructures in these cases could be destroyed causing a largenumber of systems to stop working. In that cases, the victims need a heterogeneous communicationsnetwork in which they can communicate, without a doubt, by using different wireless access technologies,i.e., Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. The network must also be able to smoothly change the access technologies, orcalled a vertical handover, to ensure QoS for ongoing applications. In addition, the network must have amechanism to save energy. For these reasons, an SDN approach, which has been proposed in a previouswork, is considered. The performance of the system has been validated by a set of experiments in a realtestbed. The obtained results show that the proposed vertical handover can save at least 24.42 per cent ofthe energy consumed by the wireless communication. The handover delay with different UDP traffic is lessthan 150ms. Moreover, the network allows a device using Bluetooth to talk with another one using Wi-Fiover a heterogeneous connection where the end-to-end jitter is mainly below 20ms and the packet loss rateis as small as 0.2 per cent.
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