Performance and Power Analysis of a 5G UPF Varying the C-States of the Hosting Server

Energy efficiency will be a crucial feature for the next mobile network generations (B5G and 6G). Therefore, in this paper, we have examined power management techniques to minimize the power consumption while not neglecting performance of the most power-hungry 5G Network Function (NF): the User Plane Function (UPF). A classical power management technique has been used herein: the low power idle. It allows power saving caused by putting the CPU to "sleep" (i.e., C<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">x</inf> state) when not in use. Results show that, in most cases the deeper "sleeping" states are enabled, the more power is saved. This is especially true in the highest load scenario in which the power is more than halved as a result. However, results show that special care should be devoted to the enabling/disabling of the "deepest" sleeping state (C<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">6</inf>) since the transitions from it to the active state (C<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</inf>) (and vice versa) actually hinder the power savings. Finally, the performance (as in latency) has been also evaluated, results show no packet losses and small latency in all scenarios.