Adaptive load-based and channel-aware power saving for non-real-time traffic in LTE

The popularity of handheld devices, which are usually powered by batteries, has made power saving an important and practical issue in recent years. Techniques of power saving for user devices using mobile communication systems such as WiMAX and LTE (Long-Term Evolution) are parts of the major focuses in the literature. In this paper, two revised schemes of the authors’ previously proposed power saving schemes for IEEE 802.16 are proposed to be applied in LTE. The proposed schemes, namely LTE-LBPS-Aggr and LTE-LBPS-Merge, estimate the input load by traffic measurement and the channel capacity by channel quality indicator (CQI) reports, calculate the length of the sleep cycle, and notify related user equipments (UEs) of the next radio-on time for receiving data. The difference between LTE-LBPS-Aggr and LTE-LBPS-Merge lies in the grouping of UEs for sleep scheduling. LTE-LBPS-Aggr treats all UEs in a group, while LTE-LBPS-Merge allows multiple groups of UEs in sleep scheduling. The simulation study shows that in comparison with standard-based mechanisms, the proposed schemes can achieve better power saving efficiency at the cost of moderate increase on delays and the signaling overhead.