Stimulating green FTTH networks using home router virtualization

Telecom networks consume a considerable amount of electrical energy and according to the environmental guidelines, just as other businesses, telecom should aim at continuously lowering this consumption. Still in a telecom network a lot of the energy consumption is hidden under the radar, as a large part of the energy consumption is caused by the customer premises equipment (CPE), often installed by the network operator. As this equipment is consuming energy from the customer's side, the telecom operator is not confronted with the energy consumption of this equipment. This also means that the operator gains by any reduction in the cost of the CPE, regardless of whether this involves the installation of less energy efficient equipment. In this paper we investigate the use of a bridged CPE solution and a home router virtualization network solution, in which part of the functionality of a CPE is moved into the network operator equipment and as such reduce the energy consumption by equipment aggregation and specialization. In this paper, we show that this will at the same time reduce costs and as such could be a positive action for the operator, simultaneously reducing the power consumption of the CPE. On top of this bridged CPE, the incentives required to stimulate operators to introduce more energy efficient CPE equipment faster in the network are estimated. Finally, by means of game theory, we propose a method to investigate how the incentives should be placed in order to stimulate green FTTH massive deployments.