A Review of Energy Information Collection and Exposure in 3GPP Mobile Networks

International Telecommunication Union identifies sustainability as a key capability of the future 6th Generation (6G) mobile communication system. To move towards a sustainable mobile network design in future, monitoring of energy consumption and energy efficiency in user service delivery is being discussed as a part of the 5th Generation (5G) mobile communication system standards. Several ongoing activities in Release 19 and 20 of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) are focused on an energy-aware mobile network design. Energy awareness in 3GPP 5G and 6G network is envisaged to be supported by: (a) collecting energy-related information, e.g. energy consumption of the network functions, (b) exposing the information to users/third parties (application service providers), and (c) dynamically adjusting the quality of service to reduce energy consumption in networks. In this context, we review the latest standardization efforts in 3GPP on energy-aware mobile network design. Our main contribution is to highlight the challenges and open problems of an energy-aware mobile network design, and to propose a novel policy update mechanism.