Power saving by LTE DRX mechanism using a mixture of short and long cycles

As mobile devices proliferate and their applications become diversified, energy consumption has become an important issue. Long-term evolution (LTE) and its advanced version have been standardized for the future mobile communication to meet the demand for high-speed transmission. But the heavy processing demand on the user equipment (UE) leads to excessive power consumption. Discontinuous reception (DRX) was proposed to tackle the issue. This paper focuses on the effectiveness of the mechanism in power saving. Quantitative analysis of the power saving achieved by DRX using a mixture of short and long DRX cycles is conducted. To this end two metrics, power saving factor and relative power saving, are introduced. The analysis is further corroborated by simulations using parameter values in compliance with LTE specifications. Furthermore, DRX parameters have significant influence on power saving. Therefore, values of the key parameters are varied to investigate their impacts. The findings provide insights into the operation of the DRX mechanism and form the basis for its improvement.