Extending the Battery Life of Smartphones and Tablets: A Practical Approach to Optimizing the LTE Network

This article provides a practical approach to optimize the long-term evolution (LTE) network to extend the battery life of LTE devices such as smartphones and tablets. The majority of the commercially deployed LTE networks are optimized for data dongles where the battery consumption is not a major concern. With the introduction of LTE smartphones and tablets and other handheld LTE devices, battery consumption has become a major bottleneck to the end user. In this article, we analyze, evaluate, and validate the key relevant features and parameters that can potentially reduce the battery consumption and, hence, extend the device usage time. The objective of this article is to obtain the optimum parameters setting for relevant LTE features to efficiently deliver non-real-time applications with bursty traffic over the LTE network by providing power savings without perceptibly degrading the user experience. The connected and idle-mode discontinuous reception (DRX) mechanism along with the user inactivity timer (UIT) are assessed and evaluated by means of field testing in a live LTE network to identify the optimal deployment scenario for the most common data applications in a commercially deployed LTE network.