Tag Archive for: Metering

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NGMN’s new recommendations on better energy consumption measurement in virtualised networks

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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.

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Green Future Networks: Metering in Virtualised RAN Infrastructure

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Being “green”, which entails energy efficiency and sustainability without compromising performance, is increasingly recognised as a hot topic and a prerequisite for enduring success today and in the future.

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. It 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.

Furthermore, the publication emphasises the implementation and the consideration by standardisation bodies of the Redfish® model published by DMTF as a starting point, and addresses the questions which data/parameters are measured, how, and which standards to align to.

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Metering for Sustainable Networks

Green Future Networks – Metering for Sustainable Networks v1.0

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This White Paper’s recommendations are:

  • To identify and understand the behaviour of energy intensive or under-utilized parts of the network and in order to optimize and manage them in an energy efficient way it is recommended to deploy metering. Metering with more granular measurements will enable to check the energy performance of equipment in real time condition as well as to improve and promote the use of renewable energy source in a more optimized way.
  • It is recommended to deploy metering at the network and technical sites to measure the energy consumption and other relevant parameters such as temperature and humidity of the active equipment e.g. radio, backhauling and core equipment.
  • Standardized metering shall be defined with generic unified architecture for data collection, site internal communication architecture ideally equipped with higher level intelligent Next Generation Control Unit or Data Gathering Unit. In addition, measurement parameters with given accuracy as well as data collection and interfaces, including virtualized and NFV environments should be standardized
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NGMN Calls for Metering Solutions to Reach Net-Zero Emission Targets

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Frankfurt, Germany, January 25, 2022: The Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance (NGMN) today publishes its fourth Green Future Networks White Paper: “Metering for Sustainable Networks”. With this publication, the Alliance calls for metering solutions as an important step for operators to reach net-zero emission targets.

For operators, the reduction of power consumption has been identified as an essential aspect to achieve net-zero emission targets by 2050 or before and to reduce their operational expenses as well. An accurate metering system is a prerequisite to make sure that energy consumption can be properly monitored, measured, and optimised. The NGMN White Paper outlines the metering goals in different parts of mobile networks and the advantages that can be realised with the implementation of metering solutions.

With much of the energy being consumed in the radio networks, particularly base stations, metering solutions have the biggest immediate impact in radio networks. The growing number of sites is another aspect that should not be neglected. The new White Paper mainly focuses on base station equipment and their technical sites.

All insights and recommendations given in this White Paper are also applicable to other parts of the mobile network – including core networks, data centres, and backhaul.

Laurent Leboucher, SVP Orange Innovation Networks, Orange and Member of the NGMN Board says: “We, like NGMN, in particular ask equipment manufacturers to share architectures and communication protocols to improve the measurements of the energy consumption in base stations, being the most energy consuming part of mobile networks. Our request also applies to all other equipment in the network. Accurate metering solutions are absolutely essential to operators – to make progress on energy efficiency, measuring is essential. This will contribute to our net-zero targets and also to reducing networks operational expenses.”

The proposed recommendations for metering solutions assume a unified architecture of a metering system and data collection at site level, for application by operators, thus enabling deployment with low effort. This White Paper covers different use cases and operating models, different topologies of sites including sites owned by one operator, site sharing between different operators, tower companies and RAN sharing scenarios as well.

Another NGMN recommendation is to collaborate with standard developing organisations (SDOs), to create a uniform and more sustainable metering solution for mobile networks by standardising parameters to be measured, data collection methods, interfaces, and communication protocols. Furthermore, it is important to establish an interface between network operators and network equipment suppliers, including manufacturers and vendors.

With these requirements to the industry, NGMN has achieved another milestone in its Green Future Networks Project. This White Paper rounds off Phase 1 while the Alliance has started working on Phase 2 with further publications on various topics to follow in 2022.