PALO ALTO, California – January 14, 2025 — Aether SMaRT-5G is pleased to announce that along with Rutgers University WINLAB, it is joining forces with the ORCID Lab to further expand its SMaRT-5G program, broadening the current R&D efforts on 5G energy efficiency measurements, modeling and tests to support EchoStar’s Boost Mobile 5G open RAN network design and ecosystem of commercial vendors.
To accelerate the R&D effort from lab to field, Aether and WINLAB are collaborating with the ORCID lab to expand the experiments to a model of EchoStar’s Boost Mobile production network. This involves refining and validating the energy consumption models on the Boost Mobile Network, testing with commercial RUs, CUs and DUs utilized in Boost Mobile’s network, and prototyping applications to monitor and optimize energy consumption across both the RAN and mobile core. Given that ORCID encompasses both replicas of actual field deployment configurations as well as outdoor sites, this collaboration will validate the results of the current R&D efforts in real-world scenarios.
Improving wireless network energy efficiency not only helps mobile network operators substantially reduce operational costs but is also vital for environmental sustainability. Global telecommunications networks consume a staggering 90 terawatt-hours of electricity annually just to power their RAN. This massive energy footprint equals the entire electricity consumption of metropolitan Los Angeles and generates CO2 emissions equivalent to what major European cities produce in a year. Even a modest 10% reduction in RAN energy consumption would eliminate emissions equivalent to 4.3 million transatlantic flights. As mobile operators worldwide push toward more sustainable operations, optimizing RAN energy efficiency represents one of the most significant opportunities to reduce the industry’s carbon footprint while maintaining the essential connectivity that powers our digital world.
“The collaboration among Aether, WINLAB, and ORCID combines key capabilities and expertise essential to develop and field open RAN technologies”, said Sarat Puthenpura, Chief Architect, Open RAN, Aether and SMaRT-5G. “We believe this will accelerate the adoption and viable commercialization of open RAN architectures by addressing the challenge of RAN energy consumption and management.”
“The collaboration among Aether, WINLAB and ORCID will enable us to further our objectives in providing relevant results to the industry,” said N. K. Shankaranarayanan, Affiliate Research Scientist at WINLAB. ”Measurements from the O-RAN systems and components in the ORCID Lab will allow us to validate our test methodology, refine energy consumption models, and improve energy optimization solutions.”
“ORCID is pleased to partner with WINLAB to provide a production level telecom technology stack to enable new use case testing in both lab and field environments for the advancement of O-RAN,” said Ravinder Jarral, Vice President, Network Development, Boost Mobile.
About Aether SMaRT-5G
Aether SMaRT-5G is an open source project advancing energy savings on 5G networks. The project is researching energy measurement and modeling techniques for 5G mobile open RAN networks. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) of the US Department of Commerce has been supporting the initiative with a $2M research grant through their Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund (PWSCIF).
About WINLAB
WINLAB (Wireless Information Network Laboratory), an industry-university cooperative research center focused on wireless technology, was founded at New Jersey’s Rutgers University in 1989. Its research mission is to advance the development of wireless networking technology by combining the resources of government, industry and academia. The center’s educational mission is to train the next generation of wireless technologists via graduate research programs that are especially relevant to industry. WINLAB, in collaboration with Aether has created POET (Platform for O-RAN Energy Efficiency Testing), which consists of bare-metal and Kubernetes open source O-RAN network functions, commercial open radio units (O-RUs), and software defined radios (SDRs), to enable research and training on energy efficiency testing, modeling, and optimization.
About ORCID
The Open RAN Center for Integration & Deployment (ORCID) serves a critical role in strengthening the global Open RAN ecosystem and building the next generation of wireless networks. EchoStar Corporation is the lead participant in the ORCID consortium, which also includes Fujitsu Network Communications, Inc., Mavenir Systems Inc., and VMware by Broadcom. ORCID is further supported by: Keysight, Viavi, Dell Technologies, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). ORCID is made possible thanks to funding from a $50 million grant from PWSCIF.
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“The demo setup with desktop PCs running a disaggregated 5G private mobile network. Our live installation also showcased the ability to deploy the 5G PMN as disaggregated components. This included the control and user plane separation (CUPS) capability of Charmed Aether SD-Core.”
