An outband paging protocol for energy-efficient mobile communications

A new protocol is proposed for reducing the power consumption of battery-powered terminals in a mobile computing environment. We exploit the fact that, in a mobile data network, mobile terminals do not continuously receive data and therefore they need not continuously operate their receivers. Nevertheless, they need to check their traffic condition periodically, that is, whether there are pending data for them or not. The proposed energy-efficient protocol is based on a paging procedure wherein a dedicated channel is used to alert (page) terminals with pending traffic. Each terminal may check its traffic condition whenever it decides to by monitoring the paging channel. The protocol is evaluated through an approximated theoretical model and through computer simulation. We focus on deriving approximate formulas for the mean message delay, the message delay variance and the power consumption. It is shown that the proposed protocol can achieve considerable power saving at a cost of increased message delivery delay.