and improve energy efficiency in the front, intermediate and return networks, which is a fundamental step to reduce operating costs and meet sustainability goals.
In its latest report, Green Future Networks: Metering in RAN Transport Networks, the NGMN highlights that energy consumption and efficiency remain insufficiently addressed due to the wide variety of telecom standards development organizations (SDOs) and other standards bodies working on energy metering standards.
The NGMN emphasizes that this fragmented landscape poses a significant structural obstacle to enabling comparable, function-specific energy measurements across all transport networks. With the global trend toward All-IP networks, the Alliance therefore recommends greater collaboration and harmonization among all relevant SDOs to deliver a coherent vision for standardization, encompassing the physical layer, the network layer, and even the transport layer (OSI and TCP/IP models), including the upcoming virtualization of transport functions.
The Radio Access Network (RAN) plays a critical role in transmitting data between radio towers and the core network, enabling devices like smartphones to communicate with the internet and with each other. Given the widespread use of transport equipment across multiple sectors, NGMN emphasizes the importance of bringing together standards bodies to harmonize definitions, data models, and interfaces, a prerequisite for efficient observability and energy management.
“From both a cost and carbon footprint perspective, energy consumption is one of the biggest challenges facing our industry,” said Laurent Leboucher, Chairman of the Board of Directors of NGMN Alliance and Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Networks at the Orange Group. “As we move towards virtualized and cloud-native architectures that utilize shared computing, we need industry-wide standards that enable us to measure energy consumption consistently and transparently. NGMN’s recommendations on standards in this area are a crucial first step,” he added.
Building on NGMN’s 2024 publication, Metering in Virtualized RAN Infrastructure, the new publication concludes that greater standardization is needed, particularly in defining harmonized data models and key performance indicators to enable energy efficiency measurements at the device, network function, and 5G segment levels. It also emphasizes the need to align APIs across SDOs so that operators can consistently expose and manage energy efficiency metrics.
“Measurement is essential for monitoring energy consumption and efficiency, two fundamental indicators for network optimization,” said Arash Ashouriha, member of the NGMN Board of Directors and Senior Vice President of Technology at Deutsche Telekom Group. “This publication, led by Deutsche Telekom in close collaboration with our NGMN Alliance partners, identifies key standards, explores measurement in virtualized or cloud-native transport networks, and offers recommendations for future standardization, with the goal of ensuring that mobile network operators can accurately measure energy consumption. We are encouraged by the ongoing efforts of several SDOs that are beginning to address these recommendations.”
The publication also provides a comprehensive overview of the regulatory landscape encompassing microwave, fiber, optical networks, packet transport, and virtualized functions. It highlights the importance of allocating energy consumption to individual functions, services, and segments, particularly in virtualized, cloud-native, and disaggregated environments—a crucial capability for operators seeking to optimize energy use across heterogeneous transport networks.
Together with NGMN's previous publications on metering, a comprehensive view of all RAN domains is now available, outlining the state of metering, the challenges ahead, and the next steps needed to enable meaningful optimization of energy efficiency and reduction of carbon emissions.
“Green Future Networks is a key strategic program of the NGMN Alliance,” said Anita Doehler, CEO of the NGMN Alliance. “Since 2021, this program has brought together operators, suppliers, and academics from around the world to develop strategic guidance on crucial sustainability issues for the sector. We are proud of our members’ commitment to reducing climate impact and shaping the network technologies of the future,” she added.
