NTT, NEC Reduce Power Consumption For 5G SA Core By 72% Using AWS Graviton2.
TOKYO, JAPAN, September 29, 2022 – NTT DOCOMO, INC. (DOCOMO) and NEC Corporation (NEC) today announced the completion of a trial to test energy efficiency and high performance of AWS Graviton2 processors across key elements of the 5G core network (5GC). The trial demonstrated an average of a 72% reduction in power consumption against incumbent x86 processors using NEC’s 5GC software running on AWS Graviton2. The trial tested performance within a 5GC hybrid cloud environment leveraging AWS Graviton2 and DOCOMO’s on-premises Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) infrastructure.
The trio announced at MWC 2022 Barcelona that they would jointly work on a proof-of-concept trial to test the energy efficiency of AWS Graviton2 processors across elements of NTT Docomo’s 5G core network.
These results support the future realization of a hybrid cloud environment for telecommunication networks, which enables mobile operators to provide enhanced disaster-resilient networks to customers.
AWS Graviton2 processors deliver a major leap in performance and help reduce the carbon footprint of IT workloads through energy efficiency. Traditionally, many telecommunication workloads need to reside on edge infrastructure, which have power and real estate constraints. AWS Graviton2 offers efficiency with very low cost, low power, and low hardware footprint. In this proof of concept, the use of Graviton2 was able to reduce power consumption of 5GC by 72%, on average.
Following the completion of this first phase, the companies will now conduct a second phase trial to test the 5GC network function on AWS Outposts equipped with Graviton2 processors on DOCOMO’s premises.
“We are delighted to announce that we achieved significant reduction of power consumption of 5GC thanks to NEC’s advanced, cloud-native 5GC software and AWS’s innovative and highly efficient Graviton2,” says Naoki Tani, Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer, Executive General Manager of R&D Innovation Division of NTT DOCOMO. “We will continue the collaboration on the PoC with NEC and AWS for future delivery of environmentally friendly and disaster-resilient 5G network service to our customers.”
“The significant power reduction achieved through this trial indicates a big step forward in commercializing environmentally friendly, sustainable, next-generation mobile infrastructure. NEC will continue adopting cutting-edge, low-power technologies, such as Graviton2, for its UPF and vRAN domains. Our aim is to further contribute to building a sustainable society through provision of sustainable virtual networks and the realization of next-generation, low-power mobile infrastructure.”
said Atsuo Kawamura, Executive Vice President, NEC
“Like many industries, telecommunications companies want to be able to ensure sustainability operations while maintaining the high-performance and quality of service their customers need and expect,” said Adolfo Hernandez, Vice President and General Manager Telecom Industry Business Unit at AWS. “AWS is committed to building a sustainable business for our customers and the planet and is thrilled to see the power savings Graviton2 delivers in telecommunications. We look forward to continuing to work with NTT DOCOMO and NEC to further expand the use of cloud and AWS technologies to advance sustainability and resiliency goals.”
NTT DOCOMO, Japan’s leading mobile operator with over 84 million subscriptions, is one of the world’s foremost contributors to 3G, 4G and 5G mobile network technologies.
AWS Graviton2
AWS Graviton processors are designed by AWS to deliver the best price performance for your cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2.
AWS Graviton2 processors deliver a major leap in performance and capabilities over first-generation AWS Graviton processors. Graviton2-based instances provide the best price performance for workloads in Amazon EC2. Graviton2-based instances support a wide range of general purpose, burstable, compute-optimized, memory-optimized, storage-optimized, and accelerated computing workloads including application servers, microservices, high-performance computing (HPC), CPU-based machine learning (ML) inference, video encoding, electronic design automation, gaming, open-source databases, and in-memory caches. Many AWS services, including Amazon Aurora, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon EMR, AWS Lambda, and AWS Fargate, also support Graviton2-based instances for a fully managed experience with significant price performance benefits. Thousands of customers, including Epic Games, DIRECTV, Intuit, Lyft, and Formula 1 are running production workloads on Graviton2-based instances with significant performance gains and cost savings.