NGMN recommends revision and further development of energy metering standards for greener RAN transport networks

The Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance (NGMN) today published new operator-driven guidance calling for the creation and harmonisation of energy metering standards across 5G RAN transport networks. The publication emphasises that Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) urgently need accurate, standardised methods to measure energy consumption and to improve energy efficiency across front-, mid-, and backhaul networks — a critical step in reducing operational costs and meeting sustainability targets.

In its latest deliverable, Green Future Networks: Metering in RAN Transport Networks, NGMN highlights that energy consumption and efficiency remain insufficiently addressed due to a wide landscape of telecom Standard Development Organisations (SDOs) and further standardisation bodies working on energy metering standards.

NGMN stresses that this fragmented landscape is a major structural barrier to enable comparable, function-specific energy measurements across transport networks. With the global trend towards All-IP networks, the Alliance therefore recommends stronger collaboration and harmonisation between all relevant SDOs to provide a coherent view of standardisation, arching from the physical layer to the network or even transport layer (OSI & TCP/IP model) including upcoming virtualisation of transport functions.

The RAN (Radio Access Network) transport network plays a pivotal role in transmitting data between radio towers and the core network, enabling devices like smartphones to communicate with the internet and each other. Since transport equipment is widely used across multiple industries, NGMN emphasises that bringing SDOs together is essential to align definitions, data models and interfaces — a prerequisite for efficient energy observability and management.

“From both cost and carbon footprint perspectives, energy consumption is one of our industry’s biggest challenges,” said Laurent Leboucher, Chairman of the NGMN Alliance Board and Orange Group CTO & EVP Networks. “As we move further towards virtualised and cloud-native architectures using shared compute, we need industry-wide standards to measure energy use consistently and transparently. NGMN’s recommendations towards standards in this area are a key first step,” he added.

Building on NGMN’s 2024 publication Metering in Virtualised RAN Infrastructure, the new publication concludes that further standardisation is needed, particularly in defining harmonised data models and key performance indicators that allow energy efficiency to be derived at device, network function and 5G slice level. It also emphasises the need for aligned APIs across SDOs to enable operators to expose and manage energy efficiency metrics consistently.

“Metering is essential for monitoring energy consumption and efficiency — both fundamental indicators of network optimisation,” said Arash Ashouriha, NGMN Board Member and SVP Group Technology, Deutsche Telekom. “This publication, led by Deutsche Telekom in close collaboration with our NGMN Alliance partners, identifies key standards, explores metering in virtualised or cloud-native transport networks and provides recommendations towards future standardisation, with the aim of ensuring MNOs can accurately measure energy consumption. We are encouraged by the ongoing efforts within several SDOs that are beginning to address these recommendations.”

The publication also outlines a comprehensive view of the standards landscape covering microwave, fibre, optical networking, packet transport and virtualised functions. It highlights the importance of mapping energy consumption to individual functions, services and slices, especially in virtualised, cloud-native and disaggregated environments — a crucial capability for operators aiming to optimise energy use across heterogeneous transport networks.

Together with NGMN’s earlier metering publications there is now an end-to-end view across all RAN domains, describing the state of metering, the remaining challenges and next steps required to enable meaningful energy efficiency optimisation and carbon reduction.

“Green Future Networks is a key strategic programme of the NGMN Alliance,” said Anita Doehler, CEO of the NGMN Alliance. “Since 2021, this programme has united global operators, vendors and academia to develop strategic guidance on crucial sustainability topics of the industry. We are proud of our members’ commitment to reducing climate impact and shaping future network technologies,” she added.

Collaboration is key to driving the industry’s most important topics such as NGMN’s strategic pillars: Mastering the Route to Disaggregation, Green Future Networks, and 6G. NGMN therefore invites all parties across the entire value chain to join the Alliance in this important endeavour.