Bare-Metal Development Setup for Highly Accurate Energy Measurements of Mobile Radio Interface

The exponential growth in mobile application usage has driven the continuous development of increasingly complex, high-performance mobile network architectures and protocols, resulting in greater energy demands. Consequently, optimizing power consumption is now critical in the design of both mobile hardware and software. A key challenge in creating effective energy management is the scarcity of precise power models, particularly for modern technologies like 4G LTE and 5G NR, though also relevant for older, widely adopted protocols such as GSM. A reliable and adaptable measurement setup is therefore crucial for developing and validating these models. This paper introduces a power measurement setup designed to exclusively monitor the energy consumed by the cellular module within user equipment during atomic operations. In contrast to prior work relying mainly on theoretical modeling and simulations, this study presents an innovative methodology for measuring and analyzing energy consumption at the bare hardware level. Utilizing an experimental setup featuring a cellular radio module, specialized current probes, and a high-precision digital multimeter, we conducted detailed energy consumption measurements for atomic operations specific to cellular modems in both circuit-switched and packet-switched networks.