Energy cost analysis of data plane and control plane protocols for 3GPP-LTE

Energy efficiency has become one of the key factors in the design of next generation wireless system. A lot of computation and network activity is done by protocols in mobile systems. Increase in the performance and capacity leads to an increase in complexity and overhead in protocols and signaling procedures. With the rapid growth in the information and communication technologies (ICT) and ICT related technologies there is a need to make energy efficient design in all aspects including the protocol and control signalling for better system design. Little has been done for power consumption for protocol processing and signalling in mobile cellular systems. In this paper, a detail comparison between L2 and L3 processing for control plane and user plane protocol is presented. We consider the analysis for specific hardware. However, it can be used for any other hardware platform. To give a total picture, we have shown the power consumption of web a browsing session for one hour with the increasing number of UEs, considering idle-connected and handover signaling protocols.