GreenBase: An energy-efficient middleware for baseband units in radio access networks

Recently, power consumption of radio access networks (RAN) has attracted a lot of attention since energy cost takes up a vast portion of operational expenditure (OPEX). Specifically, more than half of the energy is consumed by base stations (BS). Baseband Unit (BBU), which is responsible for baseband signal processing, is an important part of BS but still lacks effective power management solutions to improve energy efficiency. We present a power management middleware, GreenBase, to improve energy efficiency for BBUs. GreenBase consists of a software-based power metering tool, power and performance monitors as well as managers, an extensible power management policy library, and an energy efficiency analyzer. To evaluate this middleware, we construct a BBU testbed running video streaming applications based on software-defined radio platform GNU Radio/USRP. The experimental results validate GreenBase can achieve power and performance target with integrated power management policies. In particular, we find GreenBase can reduce total energy consumption by about 13% while satisfying target statistic QoS using a stochastic QoS controller.