Performance analysis of an adaptive DRX mechanism with flexible short/long cycle switching in LTE network

Discontinuous Reception (DRX) operation is specified by Long Term Evolution (LTE) for power saving of user equipment (UE). In this paper, we evaluate the performance in terms of the power consumption and average packet delay of a novel adaptive DRX mechanism designed for delay tolerant applications with a flexible Short/Long DRX Cycle switching scheme. As a comparison, we model the fixed Short/Long Cycle switching process in the current normal DRX mechanism as a Markov chain, and then extend it to a bidimensional state transition model for the Short/Long Cycle switching process in the novel DRX mechanism. The simulation results show that the new Short/Long Cycle switching scheme can achieve better power saving performance at the cost of increasing packet delay, and a tradeoff between them can be made by the appropriate configuration. It also show that the performance gain can be more observable in the case of traffic with shorter inter arrival time.