Impact of DRX on VoIP Performance and Battery Life in LTE

Abstract: Along with higher data rates and application-enriched user terminals, LTE has even higher requirements to conserve the battery power in mobile devices compared to the WCDMA terminals. In LTE, Discontinuous Reception (DRX) has been introduced as one of the key solutions to conserve battery power in mobile terminal. It is very meaningful to investigate the possible impact of DRX on power consumption and also the VoIP performance. This study evaluates several different parameter settings for DRX, and tries to find a reasonable trade-off between VoIP performance and battery life. This study report proposes DRX parameter setting to achieve maximum possible power saving with minimum VoIP degradation. Based on the assumed power saving model and simulation scenario presented in chapter 4 and chapter 5 of this report respectively, the proposed parameter settings can achieve up to ~60% of the terminal power saving. Furthermore, it is concluded that longer DRX cycles are not suitable for VoIP traffic since they introduces longer delays and degrades the VoIP performance particularly in downlink.