How to Enable Power Saving Mode in Your LTE-M Devices: A Guide for Developers

LTE-M is an excellent starting point for IoT deployments that do not require the higher throughput provided by other LTE technologies (such as Cat-1) and where energy efficiency is paramount. For IoT use cases requiring a battery and multimonth to multi-year deployments it is recommended to make use of built-in LTE-M features specifically designed to further reduce power draw: Power Saving Mode (PSM) and Extended Discontinuous Reception (eDRX).

The Aeris engineering team has tested and validated the PSM and eDRX capabilities on the Aeris Fusion IoT Network using cellular modules from the major module manufacturers. As a result of testing the Aeris engineering team has been able to document the specific commands to enable the power management capabilities for various cellular module manufacturers. The rest of this document provides information about both of these power management capabilities of LTE-M and instructions for how to configure them based on the testing performed by Aeris. The information in this document is intended to reduce the engineering effort required to test LTE-M power consumption modes for device manufacturers creating battery powered IoT applications.

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