Description du projet
Concevoir des réseaux mobiles à haute efficacité et à faible consommation d’énergie avec l’O-RAN
Le projet BeGREEN, financé par l’UE, vise à concevoir des réseaux radio évolutifs capables d’accueillir un trafic et des services croissants sans compromettre la consommation d’énergie. Les chercheurs évalueront différents mécanismes qui réduisent cette consommation au niveau de l’architecture, du matériel et de l’infrastructure, de la liaison et du système. Une architecture de réseau d’accès radio ouvert (Open radio access network, O-RAN) sera adoptée pour transformer le réseau d’accès radio en un réseau mobile désagrégé, ouvert, virtualisé et totalement interopérable. Des techniques d’intelligence artificielle et d’apprentissage automatique faciliteront la reconnaissance de modèles dans les données du système relatives au comportement de l’utilisateur, et aideront à déterminer la réponse la plus appropriée à ce comportement en termes de performance du réseau et de consommation d’énergie.
Objectif
BeGREEN will take a holistic view to propose evolving radio networks that not only accommodate increasing traffic and services but also consider power consumption as a factor. Determining the metrics by which power consumption should be included is a key feature which will be studied as first stage of the project. This will include not only the cost of the energy but also societal factors.
BeGREEN will evaluate different mechanisms by which power consumption could be reduced based on the following pillars:
At the architecture level, planning and evaluation of a massive MIMO included RAN design to achieve flexible and energy efficient connectivity considering spectrum utilisation, interference mitigation and architecture/processing complexity.
At the hardware and infrastructure level, radio-unit controlling schemes will be used in power amplifiers energy optimisation. Also, an offloading engine for hardware acceleration will be employed to achieve energy efficiency when performing radio access functions and network function virtualisation.
At the link level, the integrated sensing techniques are used to provide a better estimate of the impact of the radio channel toward improvements in spectral efficiency against the increased power consumption associated with the resulting calculations.
At the system level, the project pursues the development and evaluation of AI-based procedures to adapt the energy consumption of softwarised network functions, aiming to minimize the overall consumed energy according to the utilisation patterns of network. BeGREEN proposes an “Intelligent Plane”, as an additional plane along with user plane and data plane, that allows the data, model and inference to be seamlessly exchanged between network functions.
BeGREEN will use O-RAN as the baseline architecture, due to new/suitable interfaces and protocols it can provide, to be used for the movement of data around the network to the appropriate location for performance and efficiency assessments. In addition, the disaggregation, virtualisation and network and service management capabilities inherent in O-RAN provide the mechanisms to realise many of the infrastructure changes and techniques for energy optimisation pursued in BeGREEN.
BeGREEN will use AI/ML techniques to provide solutions for reducing the required calculations and to recognise patterns in the system level data associated with the behaviour of the user-base and to learn the most appropriate response to this behaviour in terms of both network performance and energy consumption. In this scheme, impact of the location of the AI/ML operations within the network on the performance of the approach, the consumption of power and the ability to share resources between different operations will be considered.
BeGREEN technologies will be showcased in three demonstrations. At IHP premises, the joint communications and sensing techniques toward efficient resource allocation and optimised power consumption. The project targets using reconfigurable intelligent surfaces for energy saving scenarios in the demonstrations. Furthermore, two major project demonstrations will be performed at BT premises in Adastral park. First, the ‘Intelligent Plane’ implemented using ORAN rApps and xApps will be demonstrated on a network emulator. Then, the project final integrated demonstrator using the Adastral testbed facilities to showcase BeGREEN technology innovations.
Champ scientifique
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligence
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringinformation engineeringtelecommunicationstelecommunications networksmobile network5G
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringinformation engineeringtelecommunicationsradio technology
Mots‑clés
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.2.4 - Digital, Industry and Space Main Programme
Régime de financement
HORIZON-JU-RIA - HORIZON JU Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinateur
2018 Antwerpen
Belgique
L’entreprise s’est définie comme une PME (petite et moyenne entreprise) au moment de la signature de la convention de subvention.