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Power-efficient beam tracking during connected mode DRX in mmWave and sub-THz systems
  • Syed Hashim Ali Shah ,
  • Sundeep Rangan ,
  • Sundar Aditya
Syed Hashim Ali Shah
NYU Wireless, NYU Wireless, NYU Wireless

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Sundeep Rangan
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Sundar Aditya
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Abstract

Discontinuous reception (DRX), wherein a user equipment (UE) temporarily disables its receiver, is a critical power saving feature in modern cellular systems. DRX is likely to be aggressively used at mmWave and sub-THz frequencies due to the high front-end power consumption. A key challenge for DRX at these frequencies is blockage-induced link outages: A UE will likely need to track many directional links to ensure reliable multi-connectivity, thereby increasing the power consumption. In this paper, we explore reinforcement learning-based link tracking policies in connected mode DRX that reduce power consumption by tracking only a fraction of the available links, but without adversely affecting the outage and throughput performance. Through detailed, system level simulations at 28 GHz (5G) and 140 GHz (6G), we observe that even sub-optimal link tracking policies can achieve considerable power savings with relatively little degradation in outage and throughput performance, especially with digital beamforming at the UE. In particular, we show that it is feasible to reduce power consumption by 75% and still achieve up to 95% (80%) of the maximum throughput using digital beamforming at 28 GHz (140 GHz), subject to an outage probability of at most 1%.
Jun 2021Published in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications volume 39 issue 6 on pages 1711-1724. 10.1109/JSAC.2021.3071791