Research aims to increase energy efficiency in mobile networks

IMDEA Networks Institute, a Madrid-based research organisation specialising in data networks, has contributed to the ECOMOME project — a research initiative focused on optimising energy consumption in mobile networks.

The project, which wrapped up recently, was funded by Spain’s Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, along with the European Union’s NextGenerationEU/PRTR program. It was awarded under research funding consortium CHIST-ERA’s 2021 callout, and addresses energy efficiency challenges across all components of mobile networks — from user devices to radio access and core networks.

Other institutions that worked on the project alongside IMDEA Networks were the Institute of Applied Sciences of Lyon (INSA Lyon, France), École de Technologie Supérieure de Montréal (ÉTS Montreal, Canada) and the Polytechnic University of Timișoara (Universitatea Politehnica Timișoara, Romania).

“The research covered energy efficiency in popular services like video streaming, messaging and phone calls, while also exploring emerging network architectures such as network slicing, computation offloading and programmable data planes,” said Razvan Stanica, project coordinator at INSA Lyon.

An additional part of the ECOMOME project was combining experimental research on existing architectures with forward-looking projections for future services and applications. “This approach allowed us to achieve results that will remain relevant for upcoming generations of mobile networks,” Stanica said.

IMDEA Networks’ contribution lay in assessing the energy footprint of programmable network cores, which are expected to be a defining feature of future 6G infrastructures.

“To achieve this, we enhanced our in-house programmable network testbed with advanced hardware-based energy monitoring capabilities and conducted experiments with popular network programs and real-world traffic data,” said Marco Fiore, Research Professor at IMDEA Networks and principal investigator of the project at the institute.

Societal and environmental benefits

The project’s findings could have significant implications for mobile operators and society.

“Integrating our proposed solutions into cellular networks will substantially reduce energy consumption in upcoming generations of mobile networks, leading to lower carbon emissions in the world and reducing monetary costs for mobile operators to run their networks,” said Diala Naboulsi, researcher at École de Technologie Supérieure in Québec.

Next steps

The team said the project’s measurement and modelling results can now be directly utilised by public authorities and the general public to more accurately assess the environmental impact of mobile networks.

Looking ahead, IMDEA Networks is leveraging these results to “define simple yet accurate analytical and statistical models of energy consumption in production-grade programmable hardware under various traffic conditions and network programs”, according to Fiore.

Image credit: iStock.com/baranozdemir