The impact of mobile network settings on the power consumption of vehicle remote control units

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the influence of mobile network settings on the energy consumption of electronic car control units. Signal quality and mobile network coverage are also important for both users and automotive devices that use real-time information from the network using cloud technologies to transmit, process and store data. For the quality of service measurements, Communications Regulatory Authority uses just HTTP data transmission (receipt) speed rate values in the operators’ UMTS (3G) networks (as CRA stated in annual report). But speed is not everything as many consumers in the industry are experiencing recently. In addition, improvements now also revolve about reducing the signaling load incurred when a radio bearer is established, modified or released. Another area for improvements is the signaling overhead on the air interface when little data is transferred as it consumes resources and causes battery drain from the mobile phone's point of view.

The authors focused on the UMTS (the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) 3G network, which is among the most popular 3G mobile communication technologies. We explore the RRC state machine of large cellular networks which operate in Lithuania.

Note that in UMTS network, the centralized core network (CN) is responsible for ensuring switching and routing for the end users traffic. All Network management functions and required databases are also implemented in core network. The core network domain is further divided into sub categories: serving network domain, home network domain and the transit network domain. It consists of two kinds of General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) Support Nodes (GSNs), in 3GPP named as Gateway GSN (GGSN) and Serving GSN (SGSN) (Figure 1). SGSN is the central node of the packet switched (PS) domain. It provides for routing functionality and interacts with databases (like Home Location Register (HLR)) and manages many Radio Network Controllers (RNCs).

So the authors were researching the RRC machines of Lithuanian cellular operators’ networks. The purpose of those experiments was to identify which network could provide a best user internet browsing experience, best user equipment battery consumption feature and best radio network resource utilization scheme. We can state, that comparing all these partitions, Operator2 has the optimal configuration for user experience, UE device battery consumption and network resource utilization of RRC state machine point of view.