NSN, Qualcomm boost battery life and ease congestion

Battery life is one of the biggest issues affecting smartphone performance today. But Nokia Siemens Networks and Qualcomm have teamed up to improve smartphone battery life and ease network congestion at the same time.

Following successful interoperability tests of the new 3GPP standardized Release 8 Fast Dormancy feature, the two companies have come up with a way of putting a device into battery preserving idle mode, while maintaining a connection identity on the network.

Because smartphones are ‘always-on,’ pinging the network for information constantly even when not in active use, batteries tend to drain fast. The solution to date has been to rapidly disconnect the device from the network once information is sent or received, which aids battery life but causes a huge increase in signalling traffic, clogging up network resources.

The NSN designed Cell_PCH-based feature solves this problem by putting phones into a battery-preserving idle state, but maintaining a connection identity on the network. All smartphones have built in Cell_PCH capability at present, but the feature it is not always enabled on the network side, which has been something of a challenge, especially in multivendor networks.

Tests on Qualcomm smartphone chipsets claim that operators with multivendor networks can benefit from NSN’s Cell_PCH functionality, which handles signalling up to 50 per cent more efficiently, the vendor claims.