IMDEA Networks has contributed to the ECOMOME project, a research initiative focused on optimizing energy consumption in mobile networks. The project, which concluded recently, was funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Union’s NextGenerationEU/PRTR program and awarded under CHIST-ERA 2021 call. It addressed energy efficiency challenges across all components of mobile networks, from user devices to radio access and core networks.

“The research covered energy efficiency in popular services like video streaming, messaging, and phone calls, while also exploring emerging network architectures such as network slicing, computation offloading, and programmable data planes,” explains Razvan Stanica, project coordinator at INSA Lyon. In addition, a key factor in ECOMOME’s success was combining experimental research on existing architectures with forward-looking projections for future services and applications. “This approach allowed us to achieve results that will remain relevant for upcoming generations of mobile networks,” notes Prof. Stanica.

IMDEA Networks’ contribution

IMDEA Networks played a key role in assessing the energy footprint of programmable network cores, which are expected to be a defining feature of future 6G infrastructures. “To achieve this, we enhanced our in-house programmable network testbed with advanced hardware-based energy monitoring capabilities and conducted experiments with popular network programs and real-world traffic data,” says Marco Fiore, Research Professor at IMDEA Networks and principal investigator of the project at the institute.

Societal and environmental benefits

The project’s findings have significant implications for mobile operators and society. “Integrating our proposed solutions into cellular networks will substantially reduce energy consumption in upcoming generations of mobile networks, leading to lower carbon emissions in the world, and reducing monetary costs for mobile operators to run their networks,” highlights Diala Naboulsi, researcher at École de Technologie Supérieure in Québec.

Next steps

The project’s measurement and modeling results can be directly utilized by public authorities and the general public to assess the environmental impact of mobile networks more accurately.

Looking ahead, IMDEA Networks is leveraging these results to “define simple yet accurate analytical and statistical models of energy consumption in production-grade programmable hardware under various traffic conditions and network programs”, concludes Marco Fiore.

The ECOMOME project was carried out by a consortium of institutions, including IMDEA Networks (Spain), the Institute of Applied Sciences of Lyon (INSA Lyon, France), École de Technologie Supérieure de Montréal (ÉTS Montreal, Canada), and the Polytechnic University of Timișoara (Universitatea Politehnica Timișoara, Romania).