Who Pays for the Bit? Evidence-Aware Energy Attribution Across Shared 5G and 6G Network Infrastructure

Who Pays for the Bit? Evidence-Aware Energy Attribution Across Shared 5G and 6G Network Infrastructure This preprint introduces Evidence-Aware Energy Attribution (EAEA), a proposed framework for allocating and reporting energy consumption across shared telecommunications infrastructure. As 5G networks evolve toward increasingly virtualized and distributed architectures, energy accounting becomes more challenging. Radio, transport, core, and edge resources may support multiple services simultaneously, making it difficult to determine how much energy should be attributed to individual services or network slices. EAEA addresses this problem through explicit measurement boundaries, energy allocation policies, evidence-quality assessment, and uncertainty-aware reporting. The research includes reproducible Python experiments comparing the proposed approach with traffic-proportional and resource-weighted allocation methods. An additional computational evaluation incorporates published equipment power characteristics. The accompanying open-source implementation, experimental results, and supplementary methodology are available for independent examination and reproduction. Research scope: This is an independent research preprint and has not undergone peer review. Service-level results are based on computational simulations; the framework has not been validated using measured per-service energy consumption from commercial telecommunications networks. Software DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23695070 Software repository: https://github.com/ghufr7an/eaea-energy-attribution