Towards Greener Networks: Evaluating Power Consumption in Popular Open RAN Environments

Energy efficiency, power consumption, and their cost and environmental impacts have become critical considerations in telecommunications, including fifth-generation (5G) and beyond mobile networks. This work investigates power consumption within open Radio Access Network (RAN) implementations for 4G and 5G mobile networks, such as OpenAirInterface (OAI) and Software Radio Systems RAN (srsRAN). Using two measurement tools, a hardware measurement setup and the software tool Turbostat, we evaluate and compare the power consumption across various RAN environments on our in-house mobile network testbeds. We also compare the power consumption profiles for each RAN environment under different modes/tasks. From this comparison of considered versions, we found that the srsRAN platform consumes less power than the OAI RAN for both 4G and 5G setups potentially resulting in lower operational costs in open RAN deployments.