Apple Inc.
Outage notification and context preservation for energy-harvesting devices

Abstract:

Technology described herein provides systems and technologies that help avoid waste of wireless network resources due to frequent losses of wireless connectivity with energy-harvesting devices (EHDs). An energy-harvesting-indicator communication can be sent from a wireless device to a cellular base station to inform the cellular base station that the wireless device is an EHD. The cellular base station can preserve context information and/or DL data pertaining to a wireless connection with the EHD when a wireless connection is lost due to a temporarily low level of available energy at the EHD. The context information and/or DL data can be preserved by the cellular base station until the period of time elapsed exceeds a threshold time value. Upon receiving a connection-resumption communication from the EHD, the cellular base station can use preserved context information to restore the wireless connection and proceed to send preserved DL data to the EHD.