Reducing energy consumption of LTE devices for machine-to-machine communication

We present a method to reduce the device battery consumption to efficiently support machine-to-machine (M2M) communication in LTE. We first introduce a model for calculating energy consumption of a LTE device. We assume that the M2M device transmits small amounts of data with deterministic intervals. Our model takes into account the energy consumption in active and nonactive periods which alternate depending on the configuration of discontinuous reception (DRX). We use the model with different parameter settings referring to potential future M2M devices. The results indicate that making the current maximum DRX cycle length longer would lead to significant gains in the energy consumption of M2M devices. Thus, our key contribution is to show the potential of trading the responsiveness of a device for energy consumption gain with very long DRX cycles.