Energy-Efficient Traffic Regulation and Scheduling for Video Streaming Services Over LTE-A Networks

Abstract

To reduce power consumption of smartphones, this work proposes a novel discontinuous reception (DRX)-based power saving mechanism for LTE-A networks supporting multi-services. The novel designs of the proposed mechanism mainly include the highest priority-controlled DRX (HPC-DRX) and traffic regulation plus time slicing (TRTS) schemes. In our proposed HPC-DRX/TRTS, lower priority traffic never wakes user equipments (UEs) up and all incoming traffic for UEs is temporarily buffered at the evolved Node B (eNB) and then transmitted in bursts using the overall bandwidth, yielding much better power saving performance. To support multiple users with multi-services, this paper proposes the resource allocation and burst scheduling algorithms for the HPC-DRX/TRTS. The power saving ratios of the proposed mechanisms were theoretically analyzed based on an M/G/1 busy period model. Both the percentage of sleep period and actual power consumption model were used in calculating the power saving ratio. Numerical results show that our analytical results are accurate and the proposed HPC-DRX/TRTS significantly outperforms the conventional DRX, dynamic and adjustable DRX (DADRX), and coalesced DRX in terms of power saving ratio. In addition to significantly reducing power consumption of UEs with video streaming services and diverse data applications (DDA), the proposed HPC-DRX/TRTS preserves the video playout quality at UEs as well.