i14y Lab Energy Efficiency Testing Framework — White Paper

In this white paper, the authors — Marcin Hoffmann, Marcin Dryjanski, Adrian Kliks (Rimedo Labs, an associated partner of the i14y Lab) and Ajesh Pulyaar Keerthi, Mohammadreza Razmi (Deutsche Telekom / i14y Lab) as well as Sabine Demel (Deutsche Telekom), and Norbert Entstrasser (Deutsche Telekom) as a reviewer — advocate for a unified, and complete end-to-end (E2E) energy testing framework, which can be used as a benchmarking environment for EE testing of O-RAN applications and networks.

To fully understand the necessity of developing the E2E EE testing framework, they started by looking at the basic concepts and challenges behind EE in 5G and future 6G networks.

They go on to look at what multiple standardization bodies, such as ETSI, 3GPP, and the O-RAN Alliance, and work done at O-RAN Global PlugFests have contributed to EE testing, finding that the efforts are, at this stage, only slightly related to each other. In the paper, the authors discuss aspects of this in detail, seeking to build foundations for the creation of the first, complete E2E EE testing framework.

The white paper furthermore highlights the importance of a robust EE testing framework, which is essential to serve as a platform that allows a comparison of various solutions in an end-to-end environment. In detail, the white paper provides a summary of the standardization efforts by the ETSI, 3GPP, O-RAN ALLIANCE, NGNM, and TIP, as well as some industry solutions from Keysight, VIAVI, Rohde & Schwarz, Kepler (Red Hat), and the Aether project by ONF. Based on this analysis, an End-to-End Energy Efficiency Testing Framework is proposed.

The suggested framework provides 4 views on the E2E EE testing:

• component-level, intended for the evaluation of the EE of a single stack (O-RU+O-CU+O-DU) of the network components,
• global/feature-based, intended for the evaluation of the EE algorithms deployed in the form of the xApps and rApps under a large, emulated network,
• deployment view, intended for covering the EE-related to the cloud deployment options
• multi-link/wide network, as a large-scale EE evaluation environment utilizing multiple cells together with RIC, and various cloud deployment options.

The paper goes on to point out that there are significant challenges to address in the creation of an end-to-end energy efficiency testing framework for telecommunication networks. These would include questions of metrics and benchmarks, as well as standardized methodologies. It concludes expressing the hope that this material and proposed framework can be extended and adjusted by the joint efforts to make a unified environment to evaluate EE of both O-RAN network components and various ES RIC applications.

You can download and read the i14y Lab Energy Efficiency Testing Framework White Paper here. If you have any comments or want to reach out to us to discuss the implications of the proposed energy efficiency framework, please send us a message: