Balancing power saving and single user experience with discontinuous reception in LTE

The UTRAN long-term evolution (LTE) provides flexible means to achieve micro-sleep operation for user equipment (UE) even though it is in active mode and running a service. By means of a discontinuous reception (DRX) framework pauses in transmission due to natural traffic characteristics or network prioritization can be utilized. However, the optimum setting of parameters must be provided as a compromise among reaction latency, user throughput, power consumption, and network performance. Using a realistic RF modem power consumption model for the UE, we investigate different algorithms for optimizing the balance among user throughput and power saving using a Web-browsing session as the reference. We show that with proper configuration of the DRX parameters we can optimally achieve a 95% reduction of the UE power consumption with only a moderate and acceptable 10-20% loss of experienced throughput.