Abstract: | A discontinuous reception (DRX) operation is included in the Long Term Evolution (LTE) system to achieve power saving and prolonged battery life of the user equipment. An improvement in DRX power saving usually leads to a potential increase in the packet delay. An optimum DRX configuration depends on the current traffic, which is not easy to estimate accurately, particularly for non‐real‐time applications. In this paper, we propose a novel way to vary the DRX cycle length, avoiding a continuous estimation of the data traffic when only non‐real‐time applications are running with no active real‐time applications. Because a small delay in non‐real‐time traffic does not essentially impact the user's experience adversely, we deliberately allow a limited amount of delay in our proposal to attain a significant improvement in power saving. Our proposal also improves the delay in service resumption after a long period of inactivity. We use a stochastic analysis assuming an M/G/1 queue to validate this improvement. |