@inproceedings{4b460f3616194ff580b73fd361b2c894,
title = "EcoCell: Energy Conservation Through Traffic Shaping in Cellular Radio Access Networks",
abstract = "Cellular networks contribute significantly to global energy demands and carbon emissions due to the millions of base stations deployed worldwide. We characterize the energy consumption of production base stations by performing fine-grained power and network telemetry measurements using off-the-shelf base stations. Our measurements reveal unique insights about how variations in temporal-usage patterns affect base station energy consumption. Based on these insights, we design EcoCell, a software-only solution that introduces energy-efficient traffic patterns in network flows. EcoCell can be implemented either as a traffic scheduler in the radio access network or as an independent middlebox. We evaluate EcoCell with five popular networked applications on a production basestation. We demonstrate savings up to 32\% in dynamic energy consumption of a base station, without drops in application-level quality of experience.",
keywords = "cellular networks, energy efficiency, radio access networks, traffic shaping",
author = "Zikun Liu and Seoyul Oh and Bill Tao and Yaxiong Xie and Anuj Kalia and Deepak Vasisht",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} Zikun Liu, Seoyul Oh, Bill Tao, Yaxiong Xie, Anuj Kalia, and Deepak Vasisht;; 1st New Ideas in Networked Systems, NINeS 2026 ; Conference date: 10-02-2026 Through 10-02-2026",
year = "2026",
doi = "10.4230/OASIcs.NINeS.2026.6",
language = "English (US)",
series = "OpenAccess Series in Informatics",
publisher = "Schloss Dagstuhl- Leibniz-Zentrum fur Informatik GmbH, Dagstuhl Publishing",
editor = "Katerina Argyraki and Aurojit Panda",
booktitle = "OASIcs - 1st New Ideas in Networked Systems, NINeS 2026",
}