Analytical modeling for signaling‐based DRX in 5G communication

Abstract

Abstract The millimeter wave (mmWave)‐enabled 5G wireless networks can meet the increasing demands of data rates and mobile subscriptions. However, the mmWave wireless networks require directional beamforming to overcome the propagation and penetration losses. The directional communication in turn increases the user equipment's (UE) energy expenses, as it has to perform beam searching to identify the best beam pair. Discontinuous reception (DRX) is a popular mechanism for energy saving in LTE/LTE‐A networks. The DRX mechanism when applied to mmWave‐5G networks, would also be required to incorporate the beam searching procedure making it less effective. In this article, we propose signaling‐based DRX to improve UE's energy saving in 5G networks by reducing the impediments of beam searching. Though the frequent requirement of beam searching in 5G cannot be avoided, the time in the beam searching can be curtailed if data/paging is absent. We propose to use power saving indication (PSI) that can be applied to both, connected‐ and idle‐state DRX. We employed semi‐Markov model to obtain the probabilistic estimation of power saving and delay for the proposed mechanism. The performance analysis shows that signaling can be used to improve energy saving in 5G DRX by limiting beam searching when not necessary.