  Virtualization is a key building block of next-generation mobile networks. It
can be implemented through two main approaches: traditional virtual machines
and lighter-weight containers. Our objective in this paper is to compare these
approaches and study the power consumption they are associated with. To this
end, we perform a large set of real-world measurements, using both synthetic
workloads and real-world applications, and use them to model the relationship
between the resource usage of the hosted application and the power consumption
of both virtual machines and containers hosting it. We find that containers
incur substantially lower power consumption than virtual machines, and that
such consumption increases more slowly with the application load.
