Novel Wake-up Scheme for Energy-Efficient Low-Latency Mobile Devices in 5G Networks

Improved mobile device battery lifetime and latency minimization are critical requirements for enhancing the mobile broadband services and user experience. LTE networks have adopted discontinuous reception (DRX) as the baseline solution for prolonged battery lifetime. However, in every DRX cycle, the mobile device processing unit monitors and decodes the control signaling, and thus all instances without data allocation leads to unnecessary energy consumption. This fact together with the long start-up and power-down times prevent adopting frequent wake-up instants, which leads to considerable latency. In this work, a novel wake-up scheme is described and studied, to tackle the trade-off between latency and battery lifetime in future 5G networks, seeking to facilitate always-available experience, rather than always-on. Analytical and simulation-based results show that the proposed scheme is a promising approach to control the latency and energy consumption, when the device is operating in the power saving mode. The aim of this article is to describe the overall wake-up system operating principle and the associated signaling methods, receiver processing solutions and essential implementation aspects. Additionally, the advantages compared to DRX-based systems are shown and demonstrated, through the analysis of the system energy-efficiency and latency characteristics, with special emphasis on future 5G-grade mobile devices.