Chapter 20

Power Management for 4G

Mobile Broadband Wireless
Access Networks

Maruti Gupta, Ali T. Koc, Rath

Vannithamby
Intel Labs, Intel Corporation
 Introduction (1/3)
The use of devices such as smart phones, tablets
etc. that offer the ease and convenience of
internet applications like Email and Web browsing
on the go is widespread.
Inevitably user expectations also rise in terms of
higher data rates, instant internet connectivity
and a much larger variety of applications to play
with.
Mobile broadband technologies such as LTE and
WiMAX are what make the promise of such
expectations real.
 Introduction (2/3)
LTE and WiMAX offer high-speed data transfer and
always-connected capabilities.
The high data rates in these systems are achieved
through the use of higher order MCS and MIMO
technology.
Higher speed data transmission or reception
requires higher power consumption; this in turn
drains the battery quickly.
To support battery-operated mobile devices, 4G
technology has developed power-saving features
that allow mobile device to operate for longer
durations without having to recharge.
 Introduction (3/3)
Power saving is achieved by turning off all or
some parts of the device in a controlled manner
when it is not actively transmitting or receiving
data.
4G technologies define signaling methods that
allow the mobile device to switch into
Discontinuous Reception (DRX) during RRC_Connected
in LTE and
Sleep mode in WiMAX, and
to Idle mode when inactive both in LTE and WiMAX.
 Overview of Power
Management (1/3)
Power management schemes are designed to
adapt to current and expected application traffic
workloads in order to obtain the maximum the
power savings.
At the time of design of LTE and the initial WiMAX
802.16e standards (released in 2008/2006
respectively) timeframe, application traffic was
largely dominated by Web browsing, Email, File
transfer, Voice over IP (VoIP) types of applications.
We show below the traffic models of the expected
workloads that were used to evaluate LTE schemes
to achieve power savings.
 Overview of Power
Management (2/3)

Figure shows a model of HTTP traffic, the protocol used for

web browsing. Web browsing applications typically show an
ON-OFF behavior which means that the network experiences
packet activity for a duration of time known as ON period
and then there is no packet activity for OFF period.
 Overview of Power
Management (3/3)

Figures show models of FTP traffic and VoIP traffic

In summary, the power saving mechanisms should
be capable of saving power efficiently for any traffic
Furthermore, emerging data traffic patterns are
different from the ones shown above.
 Power Management in LTE

LTE specifications provide two different mechanisms

for power management, namely Idle mode and DRX.
UE can enter Idle mode where UE is no longer
actively connected to the eNB, though the network
is still able to keep track of the UE through a
mechanism known as paging.
 Idle Mode in LTE (1/3)
UE can enter Idle mode where UE is no longer
actively connected to the eNB, though the network
is still able to keep track of the UE through a
mechanism known as paging.
Idle mode allows the UE to remain in very low
power mode since the UE needs to perform a very
limited set of functions in this mode.
The UE can be paged for DL traffic. For uplink
traffic, UE initiates a procedure to re-enter the
network by sending a connection request to the
serving eNB and re-enters into the RRC_Connected
state.
 Idle Mode in LTE (2/3)

During every paging cycle, the eNB sends out a paging

message at a known period of time called as paging
occasion.
UE can wake up during the paging occasion and listen to the
paging message to check and see if it is being paged.
 Idle Mode in LTE (3/3)
The paging occasion is kept very short, its only a few
milliseconds long and it does not require the UE to be
connected to the network.
During the Idle mode, the UE alternates between
being completely unavailable to the network and
being available for short durations during paging
occasion.
UE in Idle mode performs 3 major tasks:
Public land mobile network (PLMN) selection
Cell selection and reselection
Location registration
A registration area basically allows the UE to roam
freely across all the cells in it without having to
perform location registration for each cell.
 DRX Mode in LTE (1/4)
DRX can be enabled to save power by allowing the UE to
power down for pre-determined intervals, as directed by
the eNB.
DRX offers significant improvement on resource
utilization as well as power saving. However, DRX
increases the end to end delay if the parameters are not
set correctly.
If the DRX cycle is kept too long there can be some
scenarios where we can face with network re-entry.
In DRX, UE consumes minimal power by powering down
most of its circuitry.
During DRX UE only listens periodically DL control
channels.
 DRX Mode in LTE (2/4)

DRX is triggered by means of an inactivity timer known as

DRX-InactivityTimer, which can range in value from 1ms up
to 2.56 sec, though the values in between are not
continuous.
Whenever the UE receives any data, the DRX-Inactivity timer
is reset.
 DRX Mode in LTE (3/4)
During DRX ON period, the UE basically monitors
the channel for data and control activity and the
eNB is able to exchange data with the UE.
During the OFF period, the UE can go into low
power mode and the eNB cannot send any data
to the UE.
DRX is terminated as soon as the UE either sends
UL data or receives DL data.
In LTE, DRX cannot be enabled during an active
data exchange without restarting the DRX-
Inactivity timer.
 DRX Mode in LTE (4/4)
LTE supports the notion of ShortDRX and LongDRX.
ShortDRX basically allows the UE to have a shorter DRX
cycle and it is also limited to a pre-determined number
of cycles only.
If no data is exchanged during the ON period of the
shortDRX cycles, only then does the UE transition to
LongDRX.
LongDRX cycle may be much longer than shortDRX cycle
thus allowing the UE to gain greater power savings.
ShortDRX was introduced to reduce delays in case data
activities were to occur very soon after initiation of DRX.
 Power Management in IEEE
802.16e (1/2)
Two mechanism in IEEE 802.16e Idle and Sleep
Idle Mode
Mobile station will be de-register from base station
Mobile station will stay in Idle mode from a few seconds to
several minutes
In Idle, MS alternates between periods of Paging
Unavailable and Paging Listening Intervals
In order to contact an MS, BS will send a broadcast
message to the MS (exit Idle Mode)
A number of BSs are grouped over a contiguous
geographical region to make paging group
Paging message is send to all the BSs in the paging group,
this will allow the Idle user to move around in a bigger
geographical region
It requires network entry to move from Idle mode to
Connected mode
 Power Management in IEEE
802.16e (2/2)
Sleep Mode
For MSs in connected mode, sleep mode conserves
while still exchanging data
MS shut itself down for some pre-negotiated interval
of time but unlike Idle mode it is still connected to
BS
MS can wake up quickly from Sleep mode because it
is already connected to network
MS alternates between periods of Sleep Windows
and Listen Windows
For each MS, base station needs to keep context
about Sleep/Listen Windows which is called Power
Saving Class (PSC)
Mobile station saves power during Sleep Windows
MS can support multiple PSCs
Power Management in IEEE
802.16m
Sleep Mode enhancements
MS can only support single PSC
Listen window can dynamically be changed
MS can define multiple PSCs and depending
on the traffic it switches from one PSC to
another.
Subframe level sleep is supported with new
frame structure of 802.16m
With subframe level sleep, Sleep can be
supported even for VoIP
 Implementation Challenges
(1/2)
Main challenge of power saving is to balance the trade-
off between user experience and power consumption
Main challenge of Idle mode is to minimize the signaling
overhead due to paging/network re-entry and set an
optimum paging group size to minimize the location
updates
Main challenge of DRX mode is to accommodate latency
and throughput requirements of different applications.
A single DRX parameter set wont be enough for
different type of applications. For example VoIP and FTP
traffic have different latency requirements.
For low power consumption, it would be nice to have a
long DRX cycle. However, long DRX cycle can cause
excessive delay and bad user experience.
 Implementation Challenges
(2/2)
Users needs to periodically align their uplink and
downlink timing; having a long DRX may cause some
synchronization issues.
Power saving mechanisms need to coexist with other
MAC operations
Handover
HARQ
Scanning
Multi RAT (Bluetooth)
Conflicting requirements from each MAC operations
result in a complex optimization problem for finding
the optimum power saving mechanism.
 Traffic Profile of Diverse Data
Apps (1/2)
Figure shows the CDF of packet CDFs of Packet Interarrival Times
1
inter-arrival times for 3 different
cases, namely a user running an 0.9
active session, a user running
background traffic and a user 0.8
running an active session in
addition to background traffic. 0.7

Here background traffic refers 0.6

to the autonomous exchange of
user plane data packets

CDF
0.5
between the UE and the
0.4
network.
There is a substantial difference 0.3
between packet activity
patterns, particularly between a 0.2
Active User
user running an active session Only Background Traffic
0.1
vs. a user running only Active User + Background Traffic

background traffic. 0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200
Interarrival Time(ms)
 Traffic Profile of Diverse Data
Apps (2/2)
We observed that it doesnt CDFs of Packet Interarrival Times
1
make much difference when
applications run in background 0.9
with an active session in place.
The active session dominates 0.8
the CDF.
0.7
We can infer from Figure that
the amount of background 0.6
traffic generated by the
emerging applications is not

CDF
0.5
insignificant, and furthermore,
the behavior of background 0.4
traffic is different from the
0.3
active traffic.
If the background traffic is not 0.2
Active User
handled efficiently in the next Only Background Traffic
generation of the mobile 0.1 Active User + Background Traffic
broadband, it can drain the
battery power and create 0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200
excessive signaling overhead Interarrival Time(ms)
Signaling Overhead due to Diverse
Data Apps (1/2)
Figure shows the ratio of
signaling overhead for a
user running an active
application session

We can observe that the

ratio of Data exchanged to
the signaling overhead is
around 10,000

Active user change states

around 5-6 times per
minute.
Signaling Overhead due to Diverse
Data Apps (2/2)
Figure shows the ratio of
signaling overhead for a user
running multiple applications
running in background.

We can observe that the ratio

of Data exchanged to the
signaling overhead is around
180.

Basically a lot more signaling

is used to send a lot less data.

The initial studies and

observations led to focus on
application background traffic
in order to enhance the LTE-
Advanced system in
supporting emerging
applications efficiently in terms
 Enhancement for Diverse Data
Applications (1/2)
The eDDA work item in 3GPP considers
enhancements in the following areas:

Mechanisms to improvements on the system

efficiency for background traffic with using existing
RRC states.

Mechanisms to reduce UE power consumption for

background traffic with using existing RRC states.

DRX enhancements to achieve optimum trade-off

between performance and UE power consumption for
single or multiple applications running in parallel.
Enhancement for Diverse Data
Applications (2/2)
DRX enhancements to improve adaptability to time
varying traffic profiles.

Improve system resource efficiency for connected

mode Ues.

Improve control signal overhead for larger UE

population in connected mode.

Improve power consumption and reduce signaling

overhead using mechanisms that leverage on the
assistance from UE and network.
 Conclusion
4G mobile broadband systems are very attractive for
smart devices that demand always-connected capability.
This capability of 4G doesnt allow the device to be in
low power mode as much as it would like to.

This chapter describes the details of the power efficient

mechanisms incorporated in 4G standards.

This chapter also points out the inefficiencies in the

power efficient mechanisms incorporated in the original
4G standards in supporting emerging diverse data
applications such as social networking, IM, etc.

This chapter also addresses the state of the art

technologies that are currently being explored in 3GPP
standards body in supporting emerging applications
under a work item namely Enhancements for Diverse
Data Applications.
 References
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