Sofia Cardoso Martins

Virtualized Radio Access Networks are a promising solution to reduce the energy consumption of 5G networks. However, the shift from traditional to virtualized RANs has rendered existing energy models for RANs obsolete. In this paper, we present a methodology and testbed to develop an energy model for vRANs. Our methodology estimates the energy consumption of Baseband Unit functions based on performance monitoring counters and utilization metrics collected on a testbed. We provide experimental results that offer insights into the distribution of energy across RAN functions. These results suggest that, under our experimental conditions, the physical layer is considerably more energy-intensive compared to other layers. We believe that our methodology can serve as a foundation for constructing an energy consumption model that will facilitate the development of energy-aware load balancers and the selection of energy-efficient RAN deployments, leading to significant energy savings.