Adaptive Predictive Power Management for Mobile LTE Devices

Abstract

Reducing the energy consumption of mobile phones is a crucial design goal for cellular modem solutions for LTE and 5G NR standards. Most dynamic power management techniques targeting mobile devices proposed so far, however, are purely reactive in powering down and up system components. Promising approaches extend this, by predicting information from the cell and the communication protocol to take decisions proactively. In this paper, we present a complete proactive power management approach for the modem based on on-line grant prediction. In this context, we define proactive policies that allow a mobile device to go to sleep states more often compared to reactive power management systems, e.g., in time slots of predicted transmission inactivity in a cell. Furthermore, we propose and compare two algorithmic solutions to this proactive grant prediction problem, one a feed-forward neural network and one a SARSA-λ reinforcement agent. As the implementation of these machine learning techniques also creates additional energy and resource costs, both approaches are carefully designed, optimized, and evaluated not only in terms of prediction accuracy, but also in terms of overall energy savings. Notably, our predictor implementations are able to achieve up to 17 percent in overall energy savings on real-world traces.