A measurement-based approach to analyze the power consumption of the softwarized 5G core

TL;DR

This paper presents a measurement-based method to analyze and compare the power consumption of virtualized 5G core networks using real hardware and software, highlighting the impact of deployment choices.

Contribution

It introduces a practical, measurement-based approach with an experimental testbed for evaluating power consumption in virtualized 5G core networks.

Findings

Power monitoring is feasible in real-time.

Deployment choices significantly affect power consumption.

Traffic levels influence energy usage.

Abstract

In light of the ever growing energy needs of the ICT sector, a value that is becoming increasingly important for a mobile network is its power consumption. However, the transition away from legacy network deployments tightly coupled with the underlying hardware and the adoption of the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) paradigm has made more difficult to accurately evaluate their energy and carbon footprint. In this paper, we propose and validate a measurement-based approach to analyze the power consumption of a virtualized 5G core network (5GC) deployment. We design an experimental testbed using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and open-source software as a sample architecture simulating an edge computing node and supporting three different virtualization options. We make use of both hardware-based and software-based power meters to investigate the power consumption trends associated with increasing levels of traffic and multiple 5GC deployment types. The results show the feasibility of a real-time power monitoring system and highlight how deployment choices, such as virtualization framework and 5GC software, can significantly impact on the power consumption of the network.