The post Metering in RAN Transport Networks appeared first on NGMN.

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.

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Dusseldorf Germany, 02 July 2024.

The publication can be downloaded from here.

The collaboration between NGMN’s partners helps drive the most important subjects in the industry today, including NGMN’s Strategic Focus Topics: Mastering the Route to Disaggregation, Green Future Networks and 6G. NGMN invites all parties across the entire value chain to join the Alliance in this important endeavour.

Further information and all NGMN publications can be found on the website at ngmn.org.

About NGMN Alliance

The NGMN Alliance (NGMN) is a forum founded by world-leading Mobile Network Operators and open to all Partners in the mobile industry. Its goal is to ensure that next generation network infrastructure, service platforms and devices will meet the requirements of operators and ultimately will satisfy end user demand and expectations. The vision of NGMN is to provide impactful industry guidance to achieve innovative, sustainable and affordable mobile telecommunication services for the end user with a particular focus on Mastering the Route to Disaggregation / Operating Disaggregated Networks, Green Future Networks and 6G, whilst continuing to support 5G’s full implementation.

NGMN seeks to incorporate the views of all interested stakeholders in the telecommunications industry and is open to three categories of participants/NGMN Partners: Mobile Network Operators (Members), vendors, software companies and other industry players (Contributors), as well as research institutes (Advisors). NGMN invites all parties across the entire value chain to join the Alliance in these important endeavours.

The post New guidance on reducing energy consumption in mobile networks appeared first on NGMN.

Dusseldorf Germany, 04 April 2024.

Today’s publication by the Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance (NGMN), titled ‘Green Future Networks: Metering in Virtualised RAN Infrastructure,’ offers key recommendations to the industry regarding the measurement of energy consumption in virtualised RAN networks. The publication was jointly developed by the NGMN membership, including Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), vendors and research institutes.

“Addressing the challenge of managing and minimising energy consumption is paramount within our industry,” remarked Arash Ashouriha, Chairman of the NGMN Alliance Board and SVP Group Technology at Deutsche Telekom. “Through this publication, the NGMN Alliance delivers vital recommendations for industry standards, facilitating more precise and real-time estimations of energy consumed by virtualised or cloud-native network functions.”

“Sustainability is a considerable concern for MNOs and their customers,” emphasised Laurent Leboucher, Member of the NGMN Alliance Board and Group CTO at Orange. “Accurate measurement of energy usage in our networks and associated carbon emissions is essential. This publication marks a crucial stride towards fostering greater transparency in energy consumption within virtualised infrastructure.”

This latest NGMN publication highlights the necessity of enhancing current 3GPP Virtual Network Function (VNF) / Cloud Network Function (CNF) energy consumption estimation frameworks for more precise measurement of energy consumption by VNF/CNF on shared IT/Cloud infrastructure. The publication offers several recommendations to Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) to accelerate the development of enhanced frameworks.

Additionally, the publication underscores the potential of utilizing Redfish® by DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) along with open-source tools like Kepler (Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter) and Prometheus. This combination enables MNOs to perform network-wide, real-time, and accurate estimations of IT-infrastructure performance and power consumption. These estimations are regarded as accurate enough to be effectively considered as ‘measurements’.

The publication emphasises that operating models will influence MNOs’ ability to manage the performance and energy consumption of vRAN functions. It suggests that APIs between Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and MNOs may need to replace standardised FCAPS (Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance, and Security) interfaces if not exposed by the CSP.

“Bringing together the industry to tackle our shared challenges, unlocking opportunities and providing crucial guidance to the industry is NGMN’s core mission,” stated Anita Doehler, CEO at NGMN Alliance. “This publication further advances the industry’s capacity to deploy disaggregated, virtualized and cloud-native architectures, all while effectively managing energy consumption and environmental impact.”

The publication can be downloaded from here.

The collaboration between NGMN’s partners helps drive the most important subjects in the industry today, including NGMN’s Strategic Focus Topics: Mastering the Route to Disaggregation, Green Future Networks and 6G. NGMN invites all parties across the entire value chain to join the Alliance in this important endeavour.

Further information and all NGMN publications can be found on the website at ngmn.org.

About NGMN Alliance

The NGMN Alliance (NGMN) is a forum founded by world-leading Mobile Network Operators and open to all Partners in the mobile industry. Its goal is to ensure that next generation network infrastructure, service platforms and devices will meet the requirements of operators and ultimately will satisfy end user demand and expectations. The vision of NGMN is to provide impactful industry guidance to achieve innovative, sustainable and affordable mobile telecommunication services for the end user with a particular focus on Mastering the Route to Disaggregation / Operating Disaggregated Networks, Green Future Networks and 6G, whilst continuing to support 5G’s full implementation.

NGMN seeks to incorporate the views of all interested stakeholders in the telecommunications industry and is open to three categories of participants/NGMN Partners: Mobile Network Operators (Members), vendors, software companies and other industry players (Contributors), as well as research institutes (Advisors). NGMN invites all parties across the entire value chain to join the Alliance in these important endeavours.

The post New Recommendations for Measuring Energy Consumption in Virtualized Networks appeared first on NGMN.

We were excited to be part of the “FutureNet World” in London. Our CEO Anita Döhler discussed key insights from the latest NGMN Green Future Networks publication, highlighting how the industry can tackle the high priority issues concerning energy efficiency in networking and the steps that it needs to take to build towards net zero targets.

Access our latest Green Future Networks publications  here.

We invite interested industry players to become part of our endeavour. 

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“Over the last three decades the mobile industry has provided enormous economic and societal benefits to billions of users worldwide. We must however continue this success story in a way that is sustainable and that minimises the industry’s environmental footprint”, said Arash Ashouriha, Chairman of the NGMN Alliance Board and SVP Group Technology at Deutsche Telekom. “I am proud that the mobile industry has come together – in NGMN – to share best practice and enable the whole industry to address this vitally important issue“, he added.

Laurent Leboucher, Member of the NGMN Alliance Board, Group CTO and SVP Orange Innovation Networks at Orange added: “Environmental impact is not just limited to carbon emissions – use of rare materials, plastics and water footprint all need to be considered, managed and reduced. Orange is proud to have collaborated with our industry peers to develop this NGMN publication – a publication which will provide significant value to the wider industry”.

This latest NGMN publication highlights how operators can assess the lifecycle environmental impact of their network infrastructure in terms of emissions, energy, and water footprint. The report identifies the use of Lifecycle Assessment in relation to energy and emissions and demonstrates how to calculate water footprint. Based on these tools, strategies are outlined for how to manage and reduce the environmental impact by, for example, selecting and using materials in the design of network infrastructure that have lower emissions and energy requirements and by for example switching to data centre cooling methods that use less water.

“The vision of the NGMN Alliance is to provide impactful guidance to achieve innovative and affordable mobile telecommunication services for the end user with a particular focus on Mastering the Route to Disaggregation, Green Future Networks, as well as 6G”, said Anita Doehler, CEO at NGMN Alliance. “The mobile industry is working very hard to reduce its environmental footprint. However, no single stakeholder – operator or vendor – can do this alone. We must work together, collaborate for the sake of developing new solutions, share best practices, and learn from each other to make this happen. This new publication is an excellent example of the value NGMN provides to its membership and to the wider industry”, she added.

The publication was developed with input from across the industry – with NGMN Partners representing operators, vendors, and research institutes.

The publication can be downloaded from here.

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

Further information and all publications of the NGMN Alliance can be found on their website at ngmn.org

About NGMN Alliance

The NGMN Alliance (NGMN) is a forum founded by world-leading Mobile Network Operators and open to all Partners in the mobile industry. Its goal is to ensure that next generation network infrastructure, service platforms and devices will meet the requirements of operators and ultimately will satisfy end user demand and expectations. The vision of NGMN is to provide impactful industry guidance to achieve innovative, sustainable and affordable mobile telecommunication services for the end user with a particular focus on Mastering the Route to Disaggregation / Operating Disaggregated Networks, Green Future Networks and 6G, whilst continuing to support 5G’s full implementation.

NGMN seeks to incorporate the views of all interested stakeholders in the telecommunications industry and is open to three categories of participants/NGMN Partners: Mobile Network Operators (Members), vendors, software companies and other industry players (Contributors), as well as research institutes (Advisors). NGMN invites all parties across the entire value chain to join the Alliance in these important endeavours.

The post Reducing Environmental Impact: New Report for MNOs appeared first on NGMN.

The report identifies the use of Lifecycle Assessment in relation to energy and emissions and demonstrates how to calculate Water Footprint. Based on these tools, strategies are outlined for how to manage and reduce the environmental impact by, for example, selecting and using materials in the design of network infrastructure that have lower emissions and energy requirements and by for example switching to data centre cooling methods that use less water.

The publication was developed with input from across the industry – with NGMN Partners representing operators, vendors, and research institutes.

The post Reducing Environmental Impact appeared first on NGMN.