Energy-Efficient DRX Scheduling for QoS Traffic in LTE Networks

LTE has been touted as a leading-edge mobile communication technology offering high data rate and low latency. However, with a sophisticated physical layer to boost performance, the processing demand on user equipment (UE) is tremendous, which implies that the energy consumption is heavy. To curb undesirable energy waste and extend battery life, a variety of energy-conserving measures have been developed, among which discontinuous reception (DRX) is shown to be useful. This paper introduces the light sleeping mode in order to further improve the performance of DRX for traffic with QoS requirements in LTE networks. The key idea of light sleeping is to turn off the power amplifier but leave the other components in the transceiver on to cut down energy consumption while allowing fast wakeup. Quantitative analysis shows that the proposed method can substantially reduce energy consumption and satisfy the delay requirement of QoS traffic.