MWC 2026 - EANTC Showcases Automated Energy Efficiency Testing for Open RAN
At Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona from 2 to 5 March, the European Advanced Networking Test Center (EANTC) will present a live demonstration highlighting how energy efficiency of Open RAN (O-RAN) edge clouds can be measured, analyzed, and optimized in a fully automated, reproducible way.
The demonstration is built on an integrated O-RAN test environment developed by EANTC, Deutsche Telekom, and BISDN, partners in the publicly funded project i14y Lab, and includes Calnex, SRS, and Viavi. EANTC provides the vendor-neutral test design, automated execution, and evaluation framework. Together, the partners contribute O-RAN DU/CU, test and measurement equipment, and system components, creating a realistic, multi-vendor Open RAN setup.
As operators move toward disaggregated, cloud-native RAN architectures, energy consumption has become a strategic challenge. While Open RAN enables flexibility and multi-vendor innovation, it also makes it significantly harder to understand where energy is actually consumed and how different deployment and configuration choices impact overall efficiency. EANTC’s MWC 2026 demo addresses this challenge by turning energy efficiency into a measurable, testable, and automated property of an end-to-end O-RAN deployment.
EANTC’s Test Orchestrator coordinates and automates the execution of end-to-end test scenarios. In this setup, the orchestrator controls the generation of different load conditions across the O-RAN environment, triggers test runs, and ensures that each scenario is executed in a controlled and repeatable manner. While traffic and load are being applied, energy consumption is continuously measured across the relevant O-RAN components, enabling a direct correlation between load, configuration, and power usage.
At the i14y Lab, the Deutsche Telekom team contributes the open-source-based evaluation mechanisms, building the foundation for energy efficiency optimization. BISDN contributes workload deployment mechanisms on Kubernetes (k8s) clusters, creating a CI/CD pipeline for low-cost, fully automated regression and platform diversity testing.
The demo combines automated, container-based deployment of O-DU and O-CU components with continuous energy monitoring at multiple levels, from server power intake to hardware telemetry and radio-related measurements. All measurement data is time-synchronized and stored centrally, allowing detailed post-test analysis of how different configurations and load levels affect energy consumption. This approach makes it possible to compare scenarios objectively and lays the foundation for data-driven optimization of Open RAN deployments.
A key focus of the showcased solution is automation and repeatability. Test configurations and parameters are defined in a structured way and can be re-executed consistently, making the approach suitable for integration into CI/CD pipelines. This allows energy efficiency testing to move from isolated lab experiments into continuous validation processes, supporting long-term optimization and more sustainable network design.
With this MWC 2026 demonstration, EANTC and the i14y Lab reinforce their role as an independent authority for vendor-neutral testing of disaggregated mobile end-to-end solutions. The demo shows how standardized testing and automation can help the industry better understand, compare, and improve the energy efficiency of Open RAN solutions.
Visit EANTC at Mobile World Congress 2026
EANTC will showcase the live demonstration in the Shared Exhibition of Berlin-Brandenburg, Hall 7, Stand 7C61.