Energy-efficient and QoS-aware discontinuous reception using a multi-cycle mechanism in 3GPP LTE/LTE-advanced

In the paper we present a novel energy-efficient and Quality-of-Service (QoS)-aware Discontinuous Reception (DRX) scheme by using a multi-cycle mechanism for the Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. The proposed scheme is capable of improving the power-saving efficiency while simultaneously meeting the specific QoS requirements by dynamically tuning the DRX parameters according to the traffic intensity. It is a table-driven method which off-line pre-establishes the optimal DRX parameters corresponding to the traffic intensities and different QoS requirements such as the packet delays and packet loss rates based on a theoretical analysis approach. At runtime, the DRX parameters of each User Equipment (UE) can be determined optimally with a simple table lookup without spending much computational time and resource. The analytical model is validated against simulation experiments. Based on the analysis results, the power-saving efficiency of our proposed multi-cycle DRX scheme can be effectively boosted by about 37 % comparing to that of the typical DRX scheme while simultaneously meeting the specific QoS requirements like the packet delays and packet loss rates under the scenarios with different traffic intensities.