Simulation Analysis of Discontinuous Reception Mechanism with ETSI Traffic Model in LTE Networks

The high data rates and spectral efficiency provided by the 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks utilize much power in the User Equipment (UE). The Discontinuous Reception (DRX) mechanism is an efficient power saving protocol used in the LTE/LTE-Advanced networks to save battery power of the UE. In DRX, the UE is temporarily powered down to save power while remaining connected to the network. During this power saving period, the UE checks for packet availability only for a short span of time and hence it receives data packets in a discontinuous manner. The power saved at the UE is at the expense of increased delay for packet reception. In this paper, a simulation analysis of 3-state semi-Markov DRX model with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) bursty data traffic model has been carried out using MATLAB. With the already developed mathematical model, this packet based simulation study explains the operation of a typical DRX mechanism. The simulation results obtained are analogous to the analytical results in the literature and are useful to analyse various higher order DRX models.