An architecture for virtualized home gateways

The convergence of technical advances in the field of virtualization has enabled the consolidation and scaling of resources in a cost-effective way, a trend that has also found its way into the telecommunication operator infrastructure foundations, from data centers to networks alike. Starting from the core, the impact of these developments is reaching towards the edge of the infrastructure and into the access network. In this spirit, we foresee the opportunity of virtualizing a key device of modern broadband access networks: the Residential Gateway (RGW). Presently located on the customer premises, the RGW stands between the home network and the access network. It imposes a considerable cost for the operator (acquisition and operation) and constitutes a single point of failure for all the services offered to the residential customers — such as Internet access, VoIP, IPTV and Video-on-Demand. In this paper we propose an architecture for virtualized Residential Gateways (vRGWs) which physically removes the RGW from the customer premises, moving it into the operator data center as a virtualized entity. This solution potentially reduces deployment, maintenance and operation costs, whilst improving overall flexibility, reliability and manageability — both for the access network infrastructure and for provided services.