EcoCell: Energy Conservation Through Traffic Shaping in Cellular Radio Access Networks

Cellular networks contribute significantly to global energy demands and carbon emissions due to the millions of base stations deployed worldwide. We characterize the energy consumption of production base stations by performing fine-grained power and network telemetry measurements using off-the-shelf base stations. Our measurements reveal unique insights about how variations in temporal-usage patterns affect base station energy consumption. Based on these insights, we design EcoCell, a software-only solution that introduces energy-efficient traffic patterns in network flows. EcoCell can be implemented either as a traffic scheduler in the radio access network or as an independent middlebox. We evaluate EcoCell with five popular networked applications on a production basestation. We demonstrate savings up to 32% in dynamic energy consumption of a base station, without drops in application-level quality of experience.