Optimizing the LTE Discontinuous Reception Mechanism Under Self-Similar Traffic

The discontinuous reception (DRX) mechanism has been adopted in a Long-Term Evolution (LTE) system as a core technology to prolong the user equipment´s (UE´s) battery lifetime. With the development of Mobile Internet, there is an increasingly urgent need to optimize the DRX performance to accommodate emerging applications. To describe the self-similarity exhibited by the applications, the truncated-Pareto distributed arrival traffic model is introduced into the LTE-DRX analytical framework. Following this premise, an online power-saving strategy (OPSS) has been designed on the basis of our previously proposed DRX analytical model. The OPSS, for the purpose of improving the UE´s energy efficiency, is composed of an estimation phase and an optimization phase. In the first phase, several derived statistical estimators are deployed to capture the fluctuations of traffic conditions and DRX operations. It is shown that these estimators could estimate the statistics within just 1 s. In the second phase, the DRX configuration is optimized by considering the tradeoff between packet delay and power savings. Through simulations, we study the impact of various traffic conditions and the efficiency of OPSS. The results have demonstrated that the proposed OPSS could outperform the conventional LTE DRX mechanism in terms of both energy conservation and packet delay.