5G New Radio User Equipment Power Modelling and Potential Energy Savings

Currently the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) is studying how user equipment power saving can be achieved for the upcoming fifth generation New Radio technology. To accomplish this objective a power model has been developed for evaluation of schemes related to Radio Resource Control (RRC) Connected mode, Radio Resource Management, and efficient state transitions among other topics. In this work, we examine the RRC Connected mode using a single-user numerical simulation tool and the proposed user equipment power model. We demonstrate that the use of short Discontinuous Reception (DRX) can provide 30% energy saving and 70% latency reduction as compared to the 3GPP baseline with regular DRX. Furthermore, the simulation results of two release 15 schemes and two proposed schemes for release 16 may further reduce the energy consumption 15% at the cost of a small latency increase and potentially lower overall network performance.