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EcoCell: Energy Conservation Through Traffic Shaping in Cellular Radio Access Networks

Authors Zikun Liu, Seoyul Oh, Bill Tao, Yaxiong Xie, Anuj Kalia, Deepak Vasisht

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Networks → Mobile networks
Keywords
  • energy efficiency
  • traffic shaping
  • cellular networks
  • radio access networks

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Abstract

Cellular networks contribute significantly to global energy demands and carbon emissions due to the millions of base stations deployed worldwide. We characterize the energy consumption of production base stations by performing fine-grained power and network telemetry measurements using off-the-shelf base stations. Our measurements reveal unique insights about how variations in temporal-usage patterns affect base station energy consumption. Based on these insights, we design EcoCell, a software-only solution that introduces energy-efficient traffic patterns in network flows. EcoCell can be implemented either as a traffic scheduler in the radio access network or as an independent middlebox. We evaluate EcoCell with five popular networked applications on a production basestation. We demonstrate savings up to 32% in dynamic energy consumption of a base station, without drops in application-level quality of experience.

Cite As Get BibTex

Zikun Liu, Seoyul Oh, Bill Tao, Yaxiong Xie, Anuj Kalia, and Deepak Vasisht. EcoCell: Energy Conservation Through Traffic Shaping in Cellular Radio Access Networks. In 1st New Ideas in Networked Systems (NINeS 2026). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 139, pp. 6:1-6:25, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.NINeS.2026.6

Author Details

Zikun Liu
  • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA
Seoyul Oh
  • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA
Bill Tao
  • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA
Yaxiong Xie
  • University at Buffalo, SUNY, NY, USA
Anuj Kalia
  • OpenAI, San Francisco, CA, USA
Deepak Vasisht
  • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA

Supplementary Materials

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