Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication interconnects a large number of machines to exchange information in a network. These battery operated devices exhaust their energy after continuous usage for a long period of time. Discontinuous reception (DRX) standardized by the third generation partnership project (3GPP) is an efficient power saving protocol used in wireless networks. The power saving achieved by the DRX mechanism is often compromised with the ensuing buffering delay suffered by the packets. DRX mechanism with energy harvesting improves the performance of the M2M devices by exploiting the extra sleep cycles yielded by the harvested energy. However, the operation of the energy harvesting-DRX (EH-DRX) in the fifth generation (5G) millimeter-wave (mm-wave) systems with beamforming results in poor performance metrics. Beamforming is used in 5G mm-wave networks for a base station to communicate with a group of devices situated in a particular direction. In this paper, an analytical model is devised by merging a beam-aware mechanism with the EH-DRX in the M2M mm-wave 5G networks to improve the energy efficiency. As a result, the power saving at the user equipment (UE)/M2M device is enhanced by 16% by the proposed method compared with the original EH-DRX mechanism.

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