Traffic regulation for power saving in LTE-A networks supporting video-on-demand services

To reduce power consumption of smart phones, this work proposes a traffic regulation scheme for DRX-based LTE/LTE-A networks to support video-on-demand (VoD) services. To implement the time slicing at the base station for reducing power consumption of smart phones, a regulation buffer is allocated at the base station. All incoming packets for individual user equipments (UEs) are temporarily buffered at the base station and then transmitted in individual bursts using the overall bandwidth. Under such a design, each UE can receive packets in a very short period and then enter the DRX sleep or idle cycle for a longer period, yielding better power saving performance. For VoD services, a playback buffering delay is usually required at the UE to compensate for the network jitter. Hence, shifting part of the playback buffering delay at the UE to the base station nearly degrades the playout quality of VoD services. Mathematical analyses for power saving ratios of the regular DRX and the proposed traffic regulation plus time slicing mechanisms are given in this paper. Analytical results show that the proposed traffic regulation plus time slicing scheme reduces power consumption of UEs much more effectively, compared with the regular DRX mechanism.