User Equipment current consumption on MIMO in LTE-A systems

Prolonging the battery life is important in modern smartphones. However, multitask apps, especially those for video streaming applications, increase the data demand from mobile networks and require a lot of energy. Therefore, understanding energy consumption behavior becomes essential to extend the battery life. This paper presents some real current measurements of a recently launched smartphone in LTE scenarios, exploring CA with the most common MIMO setting in 4G mobile networks, 1x1, 2x2, and 4x4. Numerical results show that energy consumption during the communication increases as the number of antennas in MIMO is larger, especially in MIMO 4x4, where higher data transmission rates are obtained. However, after analyzing the energy efficiency along of a fixed time, it is observed that MIMO 2x2 is more energy-efficient than MIMO 4X4, and even than MIMO 1x1. Observing the whole consumption profile, it is evidenced that MIMO 2x2 increases the battery life by approximately 0.04% and 2.73% compared to MIMO 1x1 and 4x4, respectively.