Energy Efficient Home Gateway Based on User Service Traffic in Always-On Home Network Environment

Home gateway (HG) is a device that connects multiple home network devices to an access network. The HG is to be always in operating state for providing any requested digital home services without suspension and user's waiting because these services can be started at any time, by any device and from any network. Furthermore, most home network devices are also required to be ready to operate at any time in the digital home environment. We call this characterized digital home network by 'always-on home network'. The characteristic of the 'always-on' in home network environment gives rise to consume more electrical power. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme to reduce the power consumed by a HG and the architecture to implement the proposed HG. The proposed scheme uses sleep and wake-up mechanism based on existence of real data traffic for user service. In the proposed scheme, almost hardware components of the HG are working, power-on, only in the period that some user service traffic is in the proposed HG; wake-up state or normal stat. On the other hand, some hardware components such as network protocol agent (NPA) with low power consumption are working in the period of no user service traffic. The NPA controls these sleep and wake-up for the proposed HG with cooperating with CPU.