DRX in New Radio Unlicensed: A Step Beyond 5G Wireless

5G wireless has ushered in new promises of improved performance and ubiquitous connectivity. However, a continuous increase in connected devices and the proliferation of the Internet of Things have already created skepticism about the capacity of 5G wireless to satisfy the huge data requirements across a myriad of devices. This has made wireless researchers, vendors, and standards bodies look beyond 5G wireless by extending 5G New Radio (NR) in unlicensed bands. Operation in unlicensed bands requires additional channel sensing and fairness across different types of networks. This makes power consumption in battery-constrained mobile devices more challenging. In this article, we introduce two different aspects of discontinuous reception (DRX) for energy and resource savings in 5G NR unlicensed networks. As 5G NR is based on directional beams, the proposed solutions are based on beam searching and beam awareness. Beam-aware DRX explores next generation NodeB's assistance to alleviate mobile user equipment's (UE's) beam searching burden and results in more power saving. Simulation experiments using real wireless traces demonstrate that our NR-U DRX solutions significantly improve UE's power saving and network resource utilization over existing 5G NR DRX.