Energy efficient future 5G net in a virtual infrastructure

- In the project HITS, High Quality Networked Services in a Mobile World, we have looked at how a virtual 5G infrastructure can be deployed in a more energy efficient way through proper placement of the virtual network functions on a given infrastructure, says Andreas Kassler, professor of computer science at Karlstad University

In a virtual environment the various network functions forming a 5G infrastructure are placed on virtual machines and these can be moved between different physical servers. This means that the energy consumption can be reduced because parts of the environment can be shut down when not needed during low load periods. Quite often you do not know precisely the amount of resources that the network functions need.
However, one can choose a more opportunistic view that would benefit energy efficiency by using fewer physical servers and place more network functions in the servers used. This unfortunately increases the risk of impairing the customer’s experience of the service as well as violates the SLA, Service Level Agreement, if your demand estimate was not correct. On the other hand, a more conservative deployment would provide better customer experience and meet the requirements of SLA by placing fewer virtual network functions on a given server and powering on more servers, which requires more energy.
- Under the leadership of Antonio Marotta, computer science researcher at Karlstad University, we have created a mathematical model, which is used to calculate how network functions forming a 5G network in a virtual environment, should be placed to attain the desired balance between energy efficiency and the risk to impair customer experience and violate the SLA, says Andreas Kassler.
NGSDP’s twelfth Expert Talk took place on 22 April at the Telekom Innovation Labs in Berlin. Researcher from the European industry and academia discussed future research and the further development needs of 5 G nets as the theme for the meeting was “Network Slicing and Next Generation Service Programming Approaches for SDNs in 5G”.
Andreas Kassler participated at the meeting and gave a talk on to ”NFV Service Chain based Network Slicing under Uncertainty – The Trade-off between Power Consumption, Capacity and Robustness.”

Other participants at the expert talk meeting were representatives of Deutsche Telekom, Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Technische Universität Berlin och German Association of the Automotive Industry.