A Unified E2E Energy Efficiency Testing Framework for Open RAN
For mobile network operators and O-RAN vendors, this framework provides a standardized way to benchmark and improve energy efficiency, addressing a critical gap in current testing practices.
The paper identifies the lack of unified procedures for comparing energy efficiency in O-RAN and proposes a novel end-to-end testing framework. Using a commercial RAN emulator and real network data, the framework achieves up to 57% improvement in energy efficiency over the baseline.
Energy efficiency (EE) is one of the key challenges for contemporary and future mobile networks, including within the Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) architecture. However, there is a significant gap in common procedures for comparing the EE of both hardware (HW) and software (SW) solutions offered by various vendors. Usually, EE improvements of both SW and HW solutions are demonstrated in a specific scenario defined by individual vendors avoiding comparisons and benchmarking under various network conditions. This paper outlines the need for unified end-to-end (E2E) EE testing for O-RAN. First, it analyzes the standards to identify missing parts. Based on the analysis, a novel O-RAN E2E EE Testing framework is proposed. The framework aims to test the EE of the xApp/rApp pair cooperating on the cell on/off switching using a commercial RAN emulator and real-world network topology data from a mobile network operator (MNO). The test results show up to 57% improvement in EE compared to the baseline.