With the trends towards Internet of Things (IoT) and massive Machine-Type Communications (mMTC) it is expected that the 5th Generation of mobile communications (5G) will have a significant amount of battery powered devices (e.g. sensors, baggage tags, etc.). Therefore, battery efficiency and duration will be essential, especially for those devices in remote locations and/or restricted areas. It would be difficult to predict all the 5G use cases, for example, that may arise from IoT however it is expected that for some of these the tradeoff between efficient power savings modes and low-latency system access might be essential. In order to solve this tradeoff, called herein User Equipment (UE) sleeping problem, the paper proposes a novel state model for 5G Radio Access Networks (RAN) that relies on a novel state called “connected inactive” where both the UE and the network does not throw away context information. The state is envisioned to be highly configurable in order to address unpredictable use cases possibly with different requirements. It is shown via protocol signaling diagrams that that the proposed solution enables a quick and lightweight transition from inactive to active data transmission.

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