Energy Efficiency And Fault Tolerance In Open RAN And Future Internet

Open Radio Access Networks (Open RAN) represent a promising technological advancement within the realm of the future internet. Research efforts are currently directed towards enhancing energy efficiency and fault tolerance, which are critical aspects for both Open RAN and the future internet landscape. In the context of energy saving in Open RAN, there exists a spectrum of methods for achieving energy efficiency. These methods include the toggling of on/off states for different hardware resources such as base station units, distributed units, and radio units. Conversely, for enhancing fault tolerance in Open RAN, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and OpenFlow based techniques of restoration and path protection using in-band control methods can be implemented. In this paper, we provide an overview of Open RAN and our view on achieving energy efficiency and fault tolerance within Open RAN. Furthermore, we implement one of our proposed energy-saving techniques and provide an overview of the results achieved. Specifically, we introduce a dynamic CPU scheduling algorithm designed to optimize energy consumption by dynamically toggling CPU cores on and off while ensuring that sufficient CPU cores remain active to maintain computational performance. Our preliminary emulation studies demonstrate energy savings across various load scenarios.