Design and Analysis of Power Consumption Models for Open-RAN Architectures

Abstract: The open radio access network (O-RAN) Alliance developed an architecture and specifications for open and disaggregated cellular networks including many elements that are being widely adopted and implemented in both commercial and research networks. In this paper, we develop transaction-based power consumption models of a centralized O-RAN architecture based on commercial hardware and considering the full end-to-end data path from the radio unit to the data center. We focus on recent fanout limitations and early baseband processing requirements related to current implementations of O-RAN and assess the power consumption impact when baseband processing is employed at different centralization points in the network. Additionally, we explore how greater fanout and sharing deeper into the network impact the balance of processing and transmission. Low processing fanout restrictions motivate greater centralization of the processing. At the same time, allowing for more open radio units per open distributed unit will quickly increase the transmission capacity requirements and related energy use.