Energy Efficiency Testing and Modeling of a Commercial O-RAN System

Abstract: Network energy efficiency is of critical importance to mobile network operators for economic and ecological reasons. The advent of the O-RAN architecture has brought disaggregation and virtualization, and in order to achieve the highest energy savings gains, we need rigorous measurement, analysis, and modeling of energy consumption at both the component and system levels. However, there remains a lack of publicly-available, quantitative data characterizing the behavior of commercial-grade O-RAN systems. In this white paper, we present a detailed energy-efficiency characterization and modeling of a commercial O-RAN system based on comprehensive power and performance measurements, using a network deployment that faithfully replicates a production O-RAN network deployed by a wireless carrier. The results are drawn from an energy test campaign conducted through a joint collaboration between the Open RAN Center for Integration and Deployment (ORCID) Lab Testing and Evaluation (T&E) Project and the Open Networking Foundation / Rutgers WINLAB Energy Efficiency R&D project. The test environment includes an O-RAN system with an AWS-hosted O-CU, a dedicated-server O-DU, and six high-power, multi-band O-RUs. Our results identify the dominant factors influencing power consumption across the O-RAN stack and quantify energy usage variation under different operational and traffic scenarios. These measurements can be used by operators to parameterize power-consumption models, ultimately supporting data-driven energy optimization and more sustainable operation of commercial O-RAN networks.