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ETHOS: Demystifying Performance, Energy, and Computational Efficiency in Virtualized 5G O-RAN Networks

Zongshen Wu, Rahman Doost-Mohammady, Ashutosh Sabharwal

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Radio Access Networks (RANs) are increasingly softwarized and disaggregated, resulting in diverse and interoperable components running on commodity hardware and compute platforms. This heterogeneous paradigm demands principled and comprehensive testing to ensure high performance and efficiency in RAN deployments. In this paper, we present a real-time RAN testing framework, called ETHOS, designed to capture fine-grained metrics on performance, energy consumption, and computational efficiency for O-RAN-compliant systems across a range of compute platforms. ETHOS leverages a shared memory-based inter-process communication (IPC) framework and automates testing through the emulation of diverse user traffic and channel conditions. We deploy ETHOS on the NVIDIA ARC-OTA platform and demonstrate its effectiveness through a detailed case study evaluating RAN components under varying scenarios. We also present a comparative study versus the srsRAN for the cross-platform observation. ETHOS is designed to be easily portable to other commercial and open-source RAN software, offering the potential for a unified testing and evaluation framework to accelerate O-RAN research and innovation.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationWiNTECH 2026 - Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental evaluation and Characterization
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages97-104
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9798400719721
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 3 2025
EventACM Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental evaluation and Characterization, WiNTECH 2026 - Hong Kong, China
Duration: Nov 4 2025Nov 8 2025

Publication series

NameWiNTECH 2026 - Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental evaluation and Characterization

Conference

ConferenceACM Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental evaluation and Characterization, WiNTECH 2026
Country/TerritoryChina
CityHong Kong
Period11/4/2511/8/25

Keywords

  • O-RAN
  • automated testing framework
  • communication performance
  • energy efficiency
  • real-time profiling system

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Software

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