Experimental Evaluation of Power Consumption in Virtualized Base Stations

Network virtualization is intended to be a key element of new generation networks. However, it is no clear how the implantation of this new paradigm will affect the power consumption of the network. To shed light on this relatively unexplored topic, we evaluate and analyze the power consumption of virtualized Base Station (vBS) experimentally. In particular, we measure the power consumption associated with uplink transmissions as a function of different variables such as traffic load, channel quality, modulation selection, and bandwidth. We find interesting tradeoffs between power savings and performance and propose two linear mixed-effect models to approximate the experimental data. These models allow us to understand the power behavior of the vBS and select power-efficient configurations. We release our experimental dataset hoping to foster further efforts in this research area.