Improving IoT Device Power Efficiency: Discontinuous Reception for Mixed Traffic in Multicast and Broadcast Services

In recent years, massive IoT networks have become increasingly important for achieving the 6G vision. However, the need for wireless resources for network management also increases, raising the importance of multicast and broadcast services (MBS). With the natural constraint of the battery life of mobile devices, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) designed the discontinuous reception (DRX) mechanism for MBS to improve power efficiency in NR. The additional DRX for MBS is designed to operate independently from the existing UE-specific DRX. In this work, we point out that the independent operation of MBS DRX could severely degrade the power-saving feature of the DRX mechanism. We propose a DRX configuration method called offset and length-aligned multi-PTM (OLAM-PTM) for mixed unicast-MBS transmission scenarios. The results show that an MBS UE could dormant more at the cost of a slight increase in resource usage and execution time at the gNB side with OLAM-PTM.