Energy-Aware Meta Sleep Scheduler, an Alternative to DRX in 5G Networks

Energy consumption reduction in 5G networks and beyond is a significant challenge. Discontinuous Reception (DRX) established by 3GPP is the current state of the art energy-saving strategy. With DRX, users that neither receive nor transmit for a certain duration are set in a sleep cycle. These users periodically wake up in order to consult the Physical Downlink Control Channel in case of potential transmissions. DRX timings are negotiated during the initial connection. Despite the inherent variability of user traffic patterns, DRX configuration parameters remain static, leading to energy waste. In addition, DRX does not consider delay constraints, which may incur QoS degradation due to inadequate sleep duration. This paper proposes Meta Sleep Scheduler (MSS) as an alternative to DRX. User sleep duration is dynamically adjusted to meet application time constraints while reducing the time users spend in high power states. Similarly to DRX, MSS is compatible with all radio resources allocation schedulers. MSS achieves an average reduction of up to 90% in user standby power consumption compared to DRX, while maintaining or surpassing DRX’s Quality of Experience.