Mute the UE.
reachability should be a negotiated schedule, not an obligation
a control-plane primitive for UE-initiated reachability muting · Hannah B. Pasandi, UC Berkeley Sky Computing Lab

Your phone pays real battery to answer every probe the network sends, and the devices trying hardest to save power pay the most. Mute lets the device declare a schedule of silence the network can plan against, five bytes on the wire, with paging loss held inside the operator's budget.

the assumption

Always-reachable is a tax the wrong devices pay

Cellular protocols assume the UE answers whenever the control plane probes it. Measured on trace data, that assumption accounts for 23 percent of standby drain on the contested device population, and that population is 31 percent of UEs, not a long tail. The devices muting most aggressively today are exactly the ones paying the most.

the primitive

Let the UE mute itself, on a schedule the network can plan against

base station paging · probes · reports Mute gate 1-byte enum + 4-byte hint UE-declared schedule muted, by schedule standby drain recovered paging loss held within 0.5% signaling overhead -12% · base-station radio energy -4% (worst-case mix)
Five bytes. A one-byte enum plus a four-byte schedule hint, exchanged between UE and serving base station; the paging scheduler plans against the declared mute schedule the way it already plans everything else, and degrades gracefully when the field is absent. What it buys. Recovers standby drain on the contested population while paging loss stays within the operator's 0.5 percent budget, cuts control-plane signaling overhead by 12 percent under the worst-case mix, and trims base-station radio energy by 4 percent.
status

Mute the UE is in submission. It is deployable per-UE: production networks can adopt it incrementally.

the family

Reachability is a privacy surface

Mute sits in the Cellular and Wireless Privacy line: the control plane's right to interrupt is also its power to track, and a UE with agency over its reachability is a UE with a smaller footprint.

Reachability should be a negotiated schedule, not an obligation.

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