LTE traffic analysis for signalling load and energy consumption trade-off in mobile networks

In the LTE systems, battery lifetime and network traffic overhead on control plane may be largely affected by the Discontinuous reception (DRX) configuration and the Radio Resource Control (RRC) Inactivity Timer. In this scenario, the paper proposes an analysis aimed at defining how to properly set the RRC Inactivity Timer to achieve a trade-off between energy savings and traffic overhead on the control plane. The analysis is based on an energy consumption model, whose key parameters are inferred directly from passive measurements carried out by monitoring a commercial eNodeB of one of the Italian Mobile Operators. The results suggest that taking into account the network traffic characteristics is possible to find the RRC inactivity timer value that permits to save energy of user's device while the increase of the signalling load is limited.