Ultra UE Power Saving with Dual Receivers

Battery life of cellular user devices (UE) is a major buying criteria for consumers due to its notable effect on user satisfaction. One way to increase a UE’s battery life is to decrease its power consumption. To achieve this, several power saving techniques were introduced during the development of 5G NR. Although these improvements decreased UE power consumption, the benefits were modest due to the inherent limitations of the receiver hardware which was designed to handle a wide range of data rates and cellular functions. This paper proposes the use of a dual receiver architecture to reduce UE power consumption in 6G networks, utilizing a conventional receiver for high-speed data reception in conjunction with an extra low power receiver for dedicated cellular functions. This paper discusses 6G cellular operations designed to take advantage of the dual receiver architecture with particular emphasis on idle mode UEs. Evaluation results are provided to justify the power saving gains and evaluate the associated latency due to the proposed cellular operations. Results show that dual receiver architecture can provide UE power saving gain of 92% while keeping the increase in latency to a modest 11% compared to that of a conventional single receiver.