Analytic analysis of LTE/LTE-Advanced power saving and delay with bursty traffic

The 4G standard Long Term Evolution (LTE) has been developed for high-bandwidth mobile access for today's data-heavy applications. However, these data-heavy applications require lots of battery power on the user equipment. To extend the user equipment battery lifetime, plus further support various services and large amount of data transmissions, the 3GPP standards for LTE/LTE-Advanced has adopted discontinuous reception (DRX). In this paper, we take an overview of various static/fixed DRX cycles of the LTE/LTE-Advanced power saving mechanisms, by modelling the system with bursty packet data traffic using a semi-Markov process. Based on the analytical model, we will show the trade-off relationship between the power saving and wake-up delay performance. This work will help to select the best parameters when LTE/LTE-Advanced DRX is implemented depending on the protocols and desired outcome of the traffic.