Adaptive and autonomous power-saving scheme for beyond 3G user equipment

Beyond 3G mobile networks will be data service centric. User equipment (UE) stays in the Connected State relatively long while supporting data services, so efficient power-saving mechanisms for the Connected State are becoming more significant in order to prolong battery life of a handset. Discontinuous reception (DRX) has been a dominant approach for power saving in the Idle State and Connected State. In this study, a novel counter-driven adaptive DRX (CDA-DRX) scheme is proposed and analysed. The CDA-DRX scheme is intended to present a generic and easy-to-implement algorithm to adaptively and autonomously adjust DRX cycle to keep up with changing user activity level. The scheme distinguishes itself from all other researches by minimising signalling overhead and easily balancing packet delivery latency and power consumption. Numerical analysis and system simulation showed that this scheme produces a better tuned DRX operation than the ones proposed in literature or suggested in the standards.