HOPE: home power efficiency system for a green network

A home network represents an increasingly large portion of a household’s electrical consumption due to the increasing number of digital home devices and the increasing complexity of the underlying communication infrastructure. Limiting a home network’s power consumption is a priority for large institutions as witnessed by evolving regulation, and a priority for individual consumers wishing to reduce their electric bills. In this demonstration, we proposed a solution that aims at reducing power consumption at both the device and network level. At the device level, our system can turn the devices off when they are not in operation and quickly turn them on when they are needed. At the network level, the solution is based on a new convergence layer denoted inter-MAC, which provides a common infrastructure to the different home network paths. In particular, the inter-MAC can be used to choose a greener path. Our solution on both levels is compatible and complementary to home network energy saving.