Enhanced DRX-aware scheduling for mobile users in LTE networks

Abstract

The Discontinuous Reception (DRX) mechanism which is widely adopted in LTE to conserve the user equipment (UE)'s battery resources, not only introduces high handover latency but also reduces the downlink scheduler efficiency. A key objective of this work is to design battery power aware scheduling by incorporating the per-UE DRX parameters (such as the On Duration Timer) in downlink scheduling. This allows maximizing the UEs battery lifetime while satisfying the application qualify of service (QoS) requirement. In this paper, we propose an enhanced DRX-Aware scheduling (eDAS) mechanism that can balance the trade-off between application QoS requirements and UE's power consumption. The eDAS scheduler accounts for both static and mobile UEs. Simulation analysis shows that the proposed eDAS scheme achieves lower packet loss rate and packet delay when compared with traditional scheduling algorithms such as Proportional Fairness (PF) and Maximum Largest Weighted Delay First (M-LWDF), while still achieving significant power conservation.