Power Monitoring for Energy Efficient 5G/6G with OAI and USRP

Application Note Number and Authors

AN-844

Authors

Bharat Agarwal and Neel Pandeya

Executive Summary

Energy efficiency is becoming a critical KPI for 5G-Advanced and 6G systems, especially in Open RAN, AI-driven PHY, and Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) testbeds.

Real-time power monitoring enables:

- Evaluation of baseband processing efficiency - Measurement of RF front-end power consumption - AI accelerator energy profiling - Optimization of system-level energy-per-bit metrics

This application note demonstrates how to implement accurate power monitoring in a 5G/6G testbed using NI measurement hardware and software tools.