Virtual Home Gateway
The Virtual Home Gateway project, led by a team at the Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) in France, replaces residential in-home gateways—devices used to access dedicated services such as data, voice and TV—with servers in the cloud. Hundreds of thousands of in-home boxes could be replaced by a smaller number of servers. This approach is expected to reduce power consumption in the residential access network by 19 percent, equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of 833,000 typical households.
“Today, most connected homes rely on in-home boxes. Unfortunately, this equipment is usually always on, 24/7, and consumes a lot of electrical power,” explained Klein. “By virtualizing these devices we save energy and make the services easier to control for network operators. There are also benefits for consumers, who will be able to more easily order new services or make adjustments to their current offerings and experience greater service reliability.”
In addition to “virtualizing” gateways, GreenTouch developed a new, distributed architecture for the servers which allows for even greater improvements to energy efficiencies. This architecture allows service providers to shut down some of the servers during slow times—thereby conserving power—and then only turning servers back on when CPU-intensive services such as deep-packet inspection or bandwidth-intensive activities such as HD streaming are required.
View the press release:
New GreenTouch Innovations to Reduce Energy Consumption in Wireline Access Communications Networks by 46 Percent
