A context-aware battery lifetime model for carrier aggregation enabled LTE-A systems

A Quality of Experience (QoE) parameter of increasing importance is the time that a battery powered communication device (e.g. smartphone) can be operated before it needs to be recharged. However, due to the fact that battery capacity is not evolving as fast as the power requirement, the battery lifetime of modern user equipment is stagnating or even decreasing from one device generation to another. In parallel, a major challenge for the design of next generation wireless systems such as LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) is that the required high portion of spectrum is not available in a consecutive portion. For this reason, a procedure called interband non-continuous Carrier Aggregation (CA) will be introduced in LTE-A which allows for the combination of multiple spectrum pieces from different frequency bands. This procedure however requires the parallel operation of multiple power amplifiers that are characterized by a high energy demand. In this paper, we quantify the impact of CA on the power consumption of LTE-A enabled communication by means of a Markovian based power consumption model that incorporates system parameters as well as context parameters. The results show that the suitability of CA does from a battery lifetime perspective strongly depend upon the actual device characteristics as well as the resource availability is the various frequency bands. Furthermore, the application of the sophisticated Kinetic Battery Model (KiBaM) shows that the charge recovery effect during idle periods does significantly affect the battery lifetime.