“The research has focused on the energy efficiency of popular services such as video streaming, messaging, and phone calls, while also exploring emerging network architectures like network slicing, computation offloading, and programmable data planes,” explains Razvan Stanica, project coordinator at INSA Lyon. Furthermore, a key factor in ECOMOME’s success has been the combination of experimental research on current architectures with projections for future services and applications. “This approach has allowed us to obtain results that will remain relevant for the next generations of mobile networks,” adds Prof. Stanica.
IMDEA Networks has played a key role in assessing the energy footprint of programmable network cores, which are expected to be a fundamental feature of future 6G infrastructures.
"To achieve this, we enhanced our experimental programmable network platform with advanced hardware-based energy monitoring capabilities and conducted experiments with widely used network programs and traffic data in real-world scenarios," says Marco Fiore, Research Professor at IMDEA Networks and head of the project at the institute.
The project's findings have significant implications for both mobile operators and society. "Integrating our solutions into cellular networks will significantly reduce energy consumption in future generations of mobile networks, contributing to lower global carbon emissions and reducing costs for mobile operators," emphasizes Diala Naboulsi, a researcher at the École de Technologie Supérieure de Québec.
The project's measurement and modeling results can be used by public authorities and citizens to more accurately assess the environmental impact of mobile networks.
Looking ahead, IMDEA Networks is leveraging these results to "define simple yet accurate analytical and statistical models for estimating energy consumption in commercial-grade programmable hardware under various traffic conditions and network schedules," concludes Marco Fiore.
The ECOMOME project has been developed by a consortium of institutions, including IMDEA Networks (Spain), the Institute of Applied Sciences of Lyon (INSA Lyon, France), the École de Technologie Supérieure de Montreal (ÉTS Montreal, Canada) and the Polytechnic University of Timișoara (Universitatea Politehnica Timișoara, Romania).
Bibliographic references
A. T. -J. Akem, B. Bütün, M. Gucciardo and M. Fiore, “Jewel: Resource-Efficient Joint Packet and Flow Level Inference in Programmable Switches,” IEEE INFOCOM 2024 – IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2024, pp. 1631-1640, doi: 10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621365.
AT-J. Akem and M. Fiore, “Towards Real-Time Intrusion Detection in P4-Programmable 5G User Plane Functions,” 2024 IEEE 32nd International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), Charleroi, Belgium, 2024, pp. 1-6, doi: 10.1109/ICNP61940.2024.10858543.
