BeGREEN

BeGREEN (Beyond 5G Artificial Intelligence Assisted Energy Efficient Open Radio Access Network) is a Horizon Europe project funded by the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU) under the Green Radio Technology call. The consortium is coordinated by Gigasys Solutions and brings together operators, vendors, research institutes and universities, including NEC Laboratories Europe.

Telecom operators account for 2-3% of global energy consumption, and around 70% of a mobile network’s energy is consumed in the Radio Access Network (RAN). BeGREEN takes a holistic view of evolving radio networks so that they not only accommodate increasing traffic and service levels, but also treat power consumption as a first-class design factor. Taking the emerging O-RAN architecture as its baseline, the project:

• develops AI/ML-based solutions for RAN control at the non-real-time and near-real-time RAN Intelligent Controllers (RICs) to improve energy efficiency, addressing problems such as interference management, resource allocation, user-to-cell association and cell switching on/off;
• designs energy-efficient hardware acceleration and distributed processing schemes for virtualized RAN functions;
• explores joint communication and sensing, digital twins, Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) and cell-free architectures as means to deliver capacity with lower power consumption;
• establishes a techno-economic basis to assess technology choices with energy efficiency as an explicit characteristic rather than an afterthought.