Abstract
The evolution of the communication and computation systems enables the user equipment (UE) to handle tremendous transmission data. However, the high-speed data processing also makes UEs release heat and might burn the chips inside the devices. The thermal issue would be more critical in millimeter-wave communications. The massive antenna arrays and the radio frequency modules not only drain the UE battery but also heat the devices. 3GPP also identified the thermal issue and suppressed heat generation by temporarily reducing UE capability in Release 15. In this work, instead of reducing the UE capability, we propose to apply the beam-aware Discontinuous Reception (DRX) mechanism to manage the power consumption and temperature of UEs simultaneously. We are the first to analyze the temperature for UEs with DRX configured. A semi-Markov model is provided, and we employ it to estimate the sleep ratio, packet delay, and steady temperature. We use a simulation program to verify the proposed analytical model. When comparing the beam-aware DRX with the baseline 5G NR DRX operation, we find that the beam-aware scheme reduces the steady temperature from $38.2^\circ C$ to $26.7^\circ C$ . The results show that Beam-Aware DRX could solve the thermal issue without sacrificing much performance of packet delivery latency.
Highlights
The increasing number of connected user equipment (UE) causes the explosion of data traffic over the communication networks
To increase the throughput for the communication requirements in the fifth-generation (5G) New Radio (NR) networks, the network operators come up with one prospective solution, which is exploiting the unused spectrum with enormous available transmission resources, such as millimeter wave frequency bands [1]
We explored the beneficial effect of the DRX mechanism on the temperature of UEs
Summary
The increasing number of connected user equipment (UE) causes the explosion of data traffic over the communication networks. By controlling UEs’ RF circuit, a DRX mechanism could reduce a considerable amount of heat from the mmWave antennas circuits. We found that a DRX mechanism with the beam-aware design, which was used to improve UEs’ power efficiency in mmWave beamforming networks, further reduces the temperature [15]–[18]. Since the UEs’ temperature increases massively when their RF modules are turned on for a continuous period [13], the discrete wake-up behavior in beam-aware design could maintain the low temperature. We explored the beneficial effect of the DRX mechanism on the temperature of UEs. Besides, with the awareness of both the overheating issue and the beam patterns in mmWave bands, a DRX mechanism with a beam-aware cross-layer design was proposed to reduce more heat than the NR baseline scheme. VOLUME 9, 2021 expected values of the main performance metrics, i.e., sleep ratio, packet delay, and steady temperature, are analyzed via a semi-Markov model. (§VI and §VII)
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