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Introduction
The E-Plane ETSI Test Suites measure Energy Consumption (EC) and Energy Efficiency (EE) in O-RU (O-RAN Radio Unit), O-DU / O-CU (O-RAN Distributed / Central Unit), and gNodeB, based on ETSI standards. The E-Plane Design Test Suites go a step further to characterize the Energy Savings (ES) performance of O-DU / O-CU and gNodeB, using advanced data analytics and reporting. EC statistics are cross-correlated with traffic, platform performance, and quality of service to completely characterize the platform.
Overview
Why is Energy Efficiency becoming so important? For calculating the energy used in a cellular network, the industry standard metric used is “number of bits transmitted per joule of energy used."
As technology has progressed from 2G through to 5G, this number has improved considerably because of better and more efficient modulation techniques that improve the quality of transmitted signal while using less energy per bit. Although 5G transmission is far more efficient than 4G, energy consumption is expected to skyrocket if no efforts are made to check it, because cellular networks are expected to get denser, to support the increasingly higher data rates that are demanded by users. Energy consumption (EC) has become a key contributor to operators’ OpEx and this is a global concern.
How Do We Calculate Energy Efficiency?
Let us define some of the commonly used phrases:
A cellular network consists of the radio access network (RAN), the core network (CN) and all the supporting services. There are also all the mobiles within the network, all of them, consuming energy to operate.
This document shall concentrate on the energy that is used in the RAN which is made up of Base Stations (BS). In 3GPP 5G parlance, that would be gNodeB.
Point to note is, as RANs move towards disaggregation and virtualization, we also need to take into consideration vRAN (virtual RAN) and O-RAN based networks.
A Base Station is more energy efficient when doing more work with same energy, doing same work with less energy or in the best case doing more work with less energy.
For networks based on O-RAN, the component systems undergo three step testing before being deployed.
O-RAN Conformance: Largely protocol domain testing involving some, or all of User Plane (U-Plane), Control Plane (C-Plane), Management Plane (M-Plane) and Synchronization Plane (S-Plane)
3GPP Conformance: When the O-RU is combined with the Distribution Unit (O-DU) and Centralized Unit (O-CU), to form gNodeB, the entire system undergoes RF domain (and performance) testing.
Energy Plane Testing: E-Plane testing combines power measurement with protocol and RF domains, requiring a cross-domain measurement system and cross-correlation of the data to gain meaningful insights into the overall energy performance of the RAN components.
The standards that govern the three types of testing above were developed in isolation and therefore it is necessary to have a unified framework to cover protocol domain, RF domain and E-Plane testing in the set-up, for maximum leverage of existing resources.
Benchmarking is a critical requirement for selection of network elements, and also for improving the equipment design, especially for better energy efficiency. So, established and standards-based methodologies and test vectors are required to facilitate benchmarking.
O-RAN and 3GPP are fast evolving standards and equipment manufacturers have to ensure continuing compliance of their products to the latest versions. Automation of the test cases and report generation is the key to ensure compatibility with the latest standards with regression testing.
Keysight E-Plane Test Suite
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