How to Evaluate gNodeB Energy Performance

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Evaluating the energy plane of gNodeB according to ETSI standards

Energy plane (E-Plane) measurement requires a cross-domain test system and cross-correlation of the resulting data to gain meaningful insights into the overall energy performance of RAN components. The system should cover three domains: the ability to measure antenna RF power output, the supply of DC or AC power, and the quality of transferred data packets in terms of block error rate (BLER). As O-RAN and 3GPP rapidly evolve, equipment manufacturers must run repeated measurements to ensure continued compliance with the new standards' versions. Automating the test cases used for regression testing and report generation is the key.

To test gNodeB, test engineers must have a set of automated test cases and analytics tools based on ETSI standards. The test setup should include a user equipment (UE) emulator, a core network emulator, and a power analyzer. The UE emulator emulates stateful UE traffic and measurements. By contrast, the core network emulator terminates the calls from the UE emulator for stateful open distributed unit (O-DU) / open centralized unit (O-CU) testing. Both emulators require dimensioning for load-testing scenarios. Measuring the power consumption of the server requires a power analyzer.

The gNodeB E-Plane test solution

Testing the E-plane of a gNodeB requires assessing its energy efficiency and performance under various conditions. The Keysight gNodeB E-Plane test solution enables energy consumption (EC) and energy efficiency measurements on components of the gNodeB using the static traffic method for testing O-RU and the dynamic traffic method for testing O-DU / O-CU and gNodeB. The solution uses Keysight’s UE emulator with built-in channel emulation to generate ETSI traffic profiles for low, medium, and busy-hour levels. The gNodeB E-Plane test solution obtains EC statistics via an integrated DMTF Redfish® hub and a power analyzer to ensure lower traffic levels result in lower EC.

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