“Sustainability is a significant concern for mobile network operators and their customers,” emphasizes Laurent Leboucher, member of the NGMN Alliance Board and Group CTO at Orange. “It is essential to accurately measure energy consumption in our networks and the associated carbon emissions. This publication marks a crucial step towards promoting greater transparency in energy consumption within virtualized infrastructure.”
This latest NGMN publication highlights the need to improve the current 3GPP frameworks for estimating the energy consumption of virtual network functions (VNFs) and cloud network functions (CNFs) to more accurately measure VNF/CNF energy consumption in shared IT/cloud infrastructures. The publication offers several recommendations to standards development organizations (SDOs) to accelerate the development of improved frameworks.
Furthermore, the publication highlights the potential of using Redfish® by the DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) in conjunction with open-source tools such as Kepler (Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter) and Prometheus. This combination allows mobile network operators to make accurate, real-time, network-wide estimates of IT infrastructure performance and power consumption. These estimates are considered accurate enough to be effectively considered "measurements." The publication emphasizes that operational models will influence ORMs' ability to manage the performance and power consumption of vRAN functions. It suggests that APIs between cloud service providers (CSPs) and ORMs may need to replace standardized FCAPS (failure, configuration, accounting, performance, and security) interfaces if the CSP does not expose them.
