The Energy Efficient Techniques in the DCF of 802.11 and DRX Mechanism of LTE-A Networks

Abstract

Mobile devices such as notebooks and smart phones have replaced the personal computer as main personal information devices. These devices drive a strong demand for wireless networks and wireless communication for the rapidly growing number of Internet users. Since mobile terminals will be severely constrained by their limited battery endurance, it is essential that new protocols and control mechanisms based on the existing 802.11 standard [45] [46] [47] [48] and Long Time Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) networks [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] be devised to reduce power consumption. It should be very energy efficient in 802.11 networks due to its short transmission and reception distance between stations and Access Point (AP). The characteristic of DCF is distributed, so every active station must turn on its transceiver to listen to the common share channel. It is apparent that the cost of DCF is very low due to this distributed characteristic. However, the energy efficiency of DCF is very poor due to this distributed characteristic also. Every active station must wait on this common shared channel by turning on its transceiver. It is socalled idle listening. Researchers have investigated a wide variety of techniques to limit the power consumption of the wireless network interface. Feeney and Nilsson [61] showed that an Orinoco Silver 802.11 card consumes on average, 47.4 mW with the receiver turned off (sleeping), 739.4 mW while listening to an idle channel, 900.6 mW while receiving data and 1346.2 mW while transmitting. Their results show that, unnecessary transmissions are costly, so is leaving the receiver on when it is receiving nothing. Hence, reducing the idle listening time is important for reducing the power consumption of 802.11. In the latter sections, we will illustrate that the overheads on idle listening to transmit an uplink data frame in the 802.11 networks are really extremely large especially when the number of active stations is large or the data frame is extremely short. Therefore the technique to conserve energy consumption is really very important. Fortunately the LTE and LTE-A propose the Discontinuous Reception (DRX) to conserve the energy consumption in idle listening. The DRX cycle, on-duration and sleep duration are scheduled by eNB. The UE just wakes up in the on-duration to receive possible PDCCH. If no further frame reception is indicated by PDCCH or no PDCCH is received, the user equipment (UE) can enter sleep mode in the