Virtualizaing home gateways for large scale energy reduction in wireline networks

About 80-90% of the energy in today´s wireline networks is consumed in the access network, with about 10W per user being dissipated mostly by the customer premises equipment (CPE). Home gateway is a popular equipment deployed at the end of networks and supporting a set of heterogeneous services (from network to multimedia services). These gateways are difficult to manage for network operators and consume a lot of energy. This paper explores the possibility to reduce the complexity of such equipment by moving services to some external dedicated and shared facilities. This paper will present first result towards virtualizing home gateway services towards some specific part of the network. When combined to quasi passive CPE, this approach can reduce the energy consumption of wired networks infrastructures. This research is done within the GreenTouch initiative which aims to increase network energy efficiency by a factor of 1000 from current levels by 2015 (http://www.greentouch.org).