Performance analysis of user power consumption in NR-unlicensed DRX

The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) in Release 16 introduced New Radio in unlicensed spectrum (NR-U) to further enhance the capacity of licensed spectrum. The user equipment’s (UE) power consumption is an important metric identified by researchers in long-term evolution (LTE) and NR, and now in NR-U. In long-term evolution (LTE) and NR, 3GPP has introduced discontinuous reception (DRX) to save the UE’s power consumption and it can also be used in NR-U. In the DRX procedure, UE sleeps when there is no data packet to serve and wakes up at regular periodic intervals to check if there are any data packets in the downlink. The UE can sleep longer and skip most channel monitoring occasions, which helps to save the power of the UE. In this article, we analyze the power consumption of the UE in the DRX mechanism over NR-U networks. We model the DRX using semi-Markov-based modeling to analyze the power consumption of the UE, and the average delay experienced by the UE in the NR-U DRX mechanism. Analytical analysis indicates that power consumption increases with increasing DRX-ON duration and decreases with increasing sleep duration. The power consumption reduces at the cost of delay, i.e., delay increases with an increase in sleep duration.