Energy Saving Mechanism with a Route Prediction Based Intra-handover in LTE Networks

Long term evolution standard employs the discontinuous reception (DRX) technology to help user equipment (UE) in energy saving. After the UE received nothing from the base station for a predefined time span, it turns off the radio frequency module to enter sleep mode for energy saving. An UE may fail to handover or lost connection for late handover in case it enters sleep mode before handover and missed the optimal handover timing, therefore results in data loss. This paper proposes an energy saving mechanism with a prediction based intra-handover which predicts the next target handover base station and the optimal handover time according to the historical path data kept in a database. The UE would check whether the next sleep mode outlast the handover time point before entering sleep mode to reduce power consumption for handover failure caused by the long DRX cycle and base station reselection. Simulation results show that the DRX mechanism helps reduce power consumption of UE by 90–95 % over the conventional one more than 7 % handover failures. The energy saving mechanism combined with route prediction leads to 22 % more energy saving while cutting handover failures to 5 %.