Power Consumption Modeling of Discontinuous Reception for Cellular Machine Type Communications

Machine-type communication (MTC) is an emerging communication trend where intelligent machines are capable of communicating with each other without human intervention. Mobile cellular networks, with their wide range, high data rates, and continuously decreasing costs, offer a good infrastructure for implementing them. However, power consumption is a great issue, which has recently been addressed by 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) by defining power-saving mechanisms. In this paper, we address the problem of modeling these power-saving mechanisms. Currently existing modeling schemes do not consider the full range of states in the discontinuous reception (DRX) mechanism in LTE-A networks. We propose a semi-Markov based analytical model, which closes this gap and shows very good results in terms of predicting performance evaluation metrics, such as the power-saving factor and wake-up latency of MTC devices compared to simulation experiments. Furthermore, we offer an evaluation of the DRX parameters and their impact on power consumption of MTC devices.