EcoCell: Energy-aware Traffic Shaping for Cellular Radio Access Networks

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EcoCell Highlight

• The rapid growth of cellular networks drives global energy demand: millions of base stations contribute large carbon emissions.
• Traditional approaches for BS energy optimization lack practical, real-world power-saving mechanisms.
• EcoCell introduces a software-only middlebox that reduces energy consumption by shaping traffic patterns in real time.

EcoCell published at NINeS'2026

EcoCell: Energy-aware Traffic Shaping for Cellular Radio Access Networks
Zikun Liu, Seoyul Oh, Bill Tao, Yaxiong Xie, Anuj Kalia, Deepak Vasisht
NINeS'2026, 2023

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Dataset (link)

We release all the dataset to advocate more findings based on our studies and for reproducing results and figures in the paper.

Main Datasets Info:

	Live Streaming	Video Streaming	Web Browsing	File Downloading	Video Conferencing
Single UE	1_8_live	1_21_dash	1_7_web	1_8_file	1_26_webrtc_3
5 UEs	1_27_live_multi_new	1_28_dash_multi_new	1_28_web_multi_new_2000	1_29_file_multi_new	1_29_webrtc_multi_new

Other Datasets Info:

Dataset Info	Dataset Name
Ablation Study	1_27_ablation
Temporal Shifting on 10 trajectories	1_17_traffic_shifting
UE Segregation Microbenchmark	1_26_toy_fair_1

Usage:

1. Go to individual folder in the dataset link that corresponding to different tasks/experiments (e.g., 1_8_live correpsonding to single UE experiment dataset for live streaming)
2. The individual folder contains:
   1. dataset
   2. src code to analyze and plot the power/DCI information

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Traffic Shaping Tool

Short: reads packets from a TUN device, queues them (fifo or per-UE), optionally timestamps for bursty transmission, rate-limits egress, and sends packets via a raw socket.

• Pipeline: receiver -> optional burst_timestamper -> scheduler (fifo | per_ue) -> rate_limiter -> sender.
• Bursty mode: sets earliest_send_time to group sends into cycles.
• Rate limiting: rate_limiter enforces bytes/sec via sleeps and respects timestamps.

Build (Linux, needs root or CAP_NET_RAW/TUN):

cd src
mkdir -p build && cd build
cmake ..
make -j$(nproc)

Run:

./main <input_device> <output_device> <use_bursty> <bursty_cycle> <policy>

Example:

sudo ./main tun0 eth0 true 1.0 per_ue
sudo ./main tun0 eth0 false 0 fifo

Note: main.cc currently uses fixed values for queue size, quantum and max bytes/sec — edit code or add CLI flags to change them. See lib/include/scheduler.h, lib/include/rate_limiter.h, lib/include/sender.h, and src/main.cc for details.

Citation

If you find this repo and our paper useful, please consider citing our paper:

@inproceedings{LiuEcoCellEC,
   title={EcoCell: Energy Conservation through Traffic Shaping in Cellular Radio Access Networks},
   author={Zikun Liu and Seoyul Oh and Bill Tao and Yaxiong Xie and Anuj Kalia and Usa Deepak OpenAI and Vasisht},
   url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:286090873}
}