According to the current studies, the telecom infrastructure is the major contributor for the ever increasing energy demand in the ICT sector and has a major part on carbon footprint to the environment. And surprisingly, more than 80% of this share is consumed by the Home Gateways (HGs).

Hence, in this preliminary work, we have explored the possibility of relocating some of the functionalities of a HG into a vHGW (virtual Home Gateway) which is hosted by a node located in NSP premises. Based on our experiment, it was possible to host up to 1000 vHGWs on a single server machine which consumes around 100W. And our result showed that the number of vHGWs hosted on server machine does not have a significant variation on its energy consumption. We have also confirmed that the capability of a vHGW’s in the provision of the network and application level services such as, routing, DHCP, firewalling and NAT, alike HG’s.

If we consider a replacement of the current HG by a quasi passive device (which can consume around 1Watt) and if we suppose that end users have triple play services over a fiber link (FTTH). By pulling those network and application level services into a vHGW and using a server machine that can host around a 1000 vHGW’s (and probably more in a near future), we can obtain about 300% energy saving in the overall wire line telecom networks. Therefore, the result of our experiment is aligned to and complies with the recommendation set by the GreenTouch project (http://greentouch.org).

Hence, the result of this study shows the benefit of service relocation of HG’s by reducing significantly the overall energy consumption of a wire line network, and minimizing the sector’s impact on the environment.

For more information about this research work. please visit vHGW Web page.