DRX-Aware Power and Delay Optimized Scheduler for Bursty Traffic Transmission

Discontinuous Reception (DRX) is one of the mechanisms to reduce User Equipment (UE) power consumption in Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems. In this work, a DRX-aware power and delay optimized scheduling scheme is proposed for downlink transmission of bursty packet data traffic. The UE power consumption is minimized by reducing the time that a UE spends receiving data. This is achieved by predominantly scheduling a single UE at a time. The mean packet burst end-to-end delay is minimized by giving priority to packet bursts with relatively small transmission time requirement when compared to a weighted value of the estimated remaining transmission time of the predominantly scheduled packet burst. The weight parameter can be adjusted according to power-delay trade off preference. The DRX timers are further taken into account to avoid wake up delays, by keeping some of the waiting UEs active before the transmission to the currently scheduled packet burst ends. Based on LTE system level simulation results, the UE power consumption could be significantly reduced while improving the mean delay using the scheduler, comparing to conventional proportional fair scheduler.