Five-Level Adaptive ReportInterval Selection Using a Hysteresis Mechanism for Low-Mobility Devices in 5G NR Networks

The expansion of Internet-of-Things (IoT) deployments in 5G New Radio (NR) networks has made periodic measurement reporting a growing burden for low-mobility devices, which benefit little from frequent updates yet must report as often as highly mobile ones. At present, User Equipment (UE) transmits MeasurementReport messages at a fixed ReportInterval—typically 240 ms—regardless of mobility. This continuous transmission needlessly depletes UE battery energy and consumes critical uplink signaling capacity. This paper proposes a five-level adaptive ReportInterval selection scheme driven by the statistical properties of Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) and Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR). A low-mobility criterion combines four statistical conditions—the variance and gradient of both RSRP and SINR—through a logical AND, while a two-stage hysteresis mechanism (a 3 dB margin and a 2 s holding timer) suppresses unnecessary level transitions. The scheme is slice-agnostic: By relying on observed signal statistics rather than network-slice labels, it serves low-mobility mMTC and stationary eMBB devices while leaving URLLC and high-mobility UEs at their standard configuration. In Monte Carlo simulations over the 3GPP TR 38.901 Urban Micro (UMi) channel model (200 UEs, 300 s, 100 iterations), the algorithm attains a classification accuracy of 91.32% and a sensitivity of 98.77%. Based on the DRX energy model, it yields an estimated 10.87% reduction in average UE power (from 28.15 to 25.09 mW) together with a 51.09% reduction in the network-wide MeasurementReport count. The hysteresis mechanism cuts level transitions by a factor of 31.33 (from 6852.7 to 218.7 per iteration), substantially lowering RRC reconfiguration signaling. Operating at O(n) complexity on the gNodeB and using only conventional MeasConfig signaling, the scheme requires no protocol additions or UE-side modifications, making it directly deployable on existing 3GPP Release 17 infrastructure as a gNB-side software update.