Design of power saving mechanism for LTE-a networks supporting mobile IPTV services

Recently, using smart phones or pads to surf the Internet via wireless networks has become a very prevailing manner. Relative to the rapid development of technologies in mobile networks, handheld devices, and multimedia applications, the battery technology for handheld devices does not progress significantly. Hence, the battery lifetime of smart phones becomes a serious problem to users. Accordingly, how to reduce the power consumption of smart phones has been becoming a hot research topic in recent years. To reduce the power consumption of smart phones, in this paper the time slicing and discontinuous reception (DRX) schemes are combined to construct an efficient power saving mechanism for LTE/LTE-A networks. The proposed power saving mechanism includes a traffic regulator at the base station for realizing the time slicing mechanism. Related DRX parameters are also properly designed for the user equipment (UE). Since multimedia streaming and IPTV are the most power-consuming applications in smart phones, multicast IPTV services over LTE-A networks are considered in this paper. Simulation results show that the proposed power saving mechanism significantly reduces the power consumption of UEs while preserving the playout quality of mobile IPTV services.