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TECHNICAL HIGHLIGHTS

ENERGY EFFICIENCY (EE) SA5

WORK AND RESULTS

By Jean-Michel Cornily, 3GPP WG SA5 Rapporteur
for EE work items

Pursuing its work on Energy Efficiency (EE) SA5 has also introduced, in its Network Resource Model,
and Energy saving (ES) of mobile networks, attributes enabling Network Slice Customers (NSC) to express
their requirements with regard to the energy efficiency of
3GPP SA5 has, in Release 17, extended the network slice they order, based on GSMA NG.116 (Generic
its scope from RAN only to the whole 5G Network Slice Template), and be periodically informed of the
actual energy efficiency of the network slice they obtained.
system. EE Key Performance Indicators All this work has been done with constant communication
(KPI) have been defined for the 5G core with ITU-T, GSMA, NGMN, ETSI EE, ETSI NFV, 3GPP SA2 and
network and network slices. RAN working groups.

As for RAN, their Energy Efficiency is defined by their During Rel-18, WG SA5 will pursue its
performance divided by their Energy Consumption (EC), efforts in various directions, including:
where the definition of the performance depends on the type
of network entity it applies to. From this, SA5 work aimed
at defining the best metrics for each of them, and their • Work with ETSI NFV to obtain more accurate virtual CPU
measurement method.
usage measurements from ETSI NFV MANO, as currently
defined measurements lack accuracy,
• Introduce additional metrics when estimating the Energy
Consumption of Virtual Machines, e.g. their virtual disk or link
usage,
• Extend our existing solution to Container-based Network
Functions (CNF), in addition to VM-based Virtualized Network
Functions,
• Investigate new use cases for Energy Saving, applied to NG-
RAN, 5GC and network slicing. AI/ML assisted energy saving
scenarios will be studied, including those based on analytics
provided by the Management Data Analytics Function (MDAF)
Performance of network slices has been defined per type of or NWDAF,
network slice, namely for enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB),
Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communication (URLLC) and • Introduce first considerations on digital sobriety in SA5.
massive Internet of Things (MIoT), whereas user plane traffic Considering that the amount of energy consumed by Network
volumes have been considered to define the performance of Functions has dependency on data, signaling and OA&M traffic
the 5GC. volumes to be processed / transported / stored by Network
Functions, we’ll introduce such considerations when designing
To measure energy consumption, a bottom-up approach has future OA&M solutions.
been adopted, starting from assessing the EC of Network
Functions up to 5GC and network slices. Whereas how to
measure the EC of Physical Network Functions (PNF) has been
defined by ETSI EE a long time ago, the page is still blank
regarding how to measure the EC of Virtualized Network
Functions (VNF). SA5 has defined a method to estimate it,
based on the estimated energy consumption of the underlying
virtual compute resource instance(s), i.e. Virtual Machine(s)
(VM). In Release 17, only the virtual CPU usage of VMs, obtained
by the Operator’s OSS from ETSI NFV MANO, has been
considered in their EC estimation.
3GPP SA5 has defined mechanisms to collect, via OA&M
standardized APIs, measurements from the 5G Network
Functions, whatever the type of measurements, including
performance and Energy Consumption related measurements,
via a common OA&M channel.
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