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

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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.


Demonstrator Scope and Overview

This demonstrator implements a measurement framework to synchronously monitor and measure power and energy consumption across multiple heterogeneous components of a wireless system.

Syncronized Power Monitoring for Wireless systems using Open-Air-Interface with NI USRP and NI cRIO (*Note: For the demo, the base station prototype is connected to a 5G prototype user terminal which is not shown on the block diagram.) ​

Device Under Test (DUT)

5G/6G Base Station Prototype, consisting of:

  • Linux server (baseband processing platform)
  • OpenAirInterface (OAI) base station stack
  • NI USRP (RF front-end)
  • External switchable power amplifier (PA)

Demo Use Cases

1. 3GPP-Aligned Demo Use Case

Energy Savings via Enhanced Cell Sleep Mechanisms

  • Demonstrates energy reduction at the base station power amplifier.
  • Evaluates increased cell sleep opportunities.
  • Quantifies real-time power savings during inactive traffic periods.

2. AI-RAN Demo Use Case

Energy Profiling of AI-Native vs. Traditional Receiver

  • Measures energy consumption of:
    • AI-native base station receiver
    • Traditional (e.g., LMMSE-based) receiver

Key Feature of the Measurement Framework

All power and energy measurements are:

  • Fully synchronized to a common time grid
  • Aligned with the 500 µs slot grid of the 5G NR system

This synchronization enables:

  • Slot-level energy analysis
  • Accurate correlation between radio activity and power consumption
  • Fine-grained energy profiling of PHY processing, RF transmission, and AI inference workloads
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