POET: A Platform for O-RAN Energy Efficiency Testing

This paper presents a platform for measuring, evaluating and modeling the energy efficiency aspects of an O-RAN 5G wireless network. We describe our open-source based O-RAN testbed which includes both bare-metal and Kubernetes network functions, in addition to physical network components. We focus on measuring power consumption of servers and workloads of cloudified and virtualized network functions. We show that a combination of different power measurements can be used successfully to achieve the accuracy and granularity required for energy efficiency measurement, evaluation and modeling.