Study on discontinuous reception modeling for M2M traffic in LTE-A networks

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications aims to enable machines to communicate with each other without human intervention. The M2M traffic is quite different from Human-to-Human (H2H) traffic. Discontinuous reception (DRX) isone of the promising technologies for energy saving in LTE-A networks. The existing works on DRX pay more attention to H2H traffic, especially focusing on DRX in RRC active mode (Active DRX). However, with the characteristics of small packet size and long packet interval in M2M traffic, the DRX in RRC idle mode (Idle DRX), rather than Active DRX, plays a major role in energy saving. This paper models the Idle DRX mechanism with M2M traffic using a semi-Markov process. Based on the proposed model, the authors analyze the performance of power saving and access delay with various parameters of DRX paging block periodicity and RRC release timer. The analytical results are verified by the simulation, which indicate that optimum performance can be achieved by focusing on adjusting RRC release timer or DRX configurations according to the M2M traffic characteristics.