BARCELONA, Spain – Red Hat and Arm announced a joint effort to develop energy-efficiency proof-of-concepts combining the Red Hat OpenShift platform on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Arm Neoverse central processing units (CPUs) during Mobile World Congress 2023.

The energy efficiency of radio access networks (RAN) has become a major priority for service providers, Red Hat's Global Telco Solutions Manager Hanen Garcia told SDxCentral. Recent research sponsored by the vendor found RAN represents three-quarters of service providers' power consumption, which has pushed an exploration of lower-energy usage "in order to remain competitive in the market and meet the demands of customers," he said.

To that point, Red Hat and Arm are collaborating to develop 5G and virtualized RAN (vRAN) offerings that boast high energy efficiency. CPUs are instrumental in designing efficient 5G networks, and Arm Neoverse CPUs offer high-performance architectures for cloud-native applications and low-latency 5G networks. Using the OpenShift container orchestration platform built on RHEL, those cloud-native applications can be deployed to any cloud environment for 5G and RAN use cases, according to the vendors.

The proof-of-concepts Red Hat and Arm plan to develop include virtualized implementation for RAN workloads using OpenShift's containerization capabilities; using centralized unit (CU) and distributed unit (DU) components to support 5G and RAN deployments; and edge applications with network-in-a-box connectivity.

CU and DU are active components of RAN architecture, which means "they are also key to any strategy to build energy-efficient 5G RAN networks," Garcia said. At the domain level of RAN management as a whole, for example, the combination of DU, CU, and radio intelligent controller (RIC) should improve efficiency by allowing service providers to control the power consumption of those active elements in real-time.

"When we look at those components individually running on a cloud-native platform such Red Hat OpenShift, it’s important that software and hardware platforms provide the features to drive energy efficiency at a system level. We are collaborating with Arm to address the challenges that arise at these various levels so service providers can build more sustainable networks," Garcia said.

Private 5G offerings and network-in-a-box are essential assets for both industrial transformation and enterprise modernization because "using a platform that supports both network-wide and application specific needs within a single 'box' ... helps to reduce the overall energy footprint of a network," Garcia said. And building an edge-in-a-box service with energy efficient platforms like Arm Neoverse CPUs will push enterprises to "reach their carbon emissions goals."

Garcia stressed this is an ongoing collaboration focused on energy efficiency, and in the next few months the pair plan "to invite more ecosystem partners to participate in the lab in order to meet the unique needs of service providers and their customers," he said.