A downlink and uplink alignment scheme for power saving in IEEE 802.16 protocol

This study shows the problem of power saving mechanism (PSM) that sleep intervals of uplink (UL) connections do not synchronize with sleep intervals of downlink (DL) connections. That is, the energy of a mobile station (MS) is not really saved if the DL connections are in the sleep mode while the UL connections are in normal mode, and vice versa. To avoid the asynchronism of power saving (PS) between UL and DL connections, we invent a mechanism of DL connections regulating UL connections, called DL and UL Alignment (DUAL) scheme, to improve the energy efficiency for PS. Considering that the buffer size of MS is limited, DUAL uses the mean packet arrival rate of UL u and a relatively safe threshold of buffer size Q T as the parameters to estimate the maximum allowable waiting time to align the UL with the DL connections. To analyze the performance of DUAL, a system model of PS is proposed to evaluate the performance of DUAL under different conditions. The correctness of performance analysis of DUAL is validated by using simulation with realistic parameters. Numerical experiments show that DUAL improves the energy conservation significantly when UL traffic is greater than DL traffic.