Optimizing the Delivery of Services Supported by Residential Gateways

Abstract

The Residential Gateway (RGW) is a key device, located on the customer premises, that stands between the home network and the access network. It imposes a considerable cost for the NSP and constitutes a single point of failure for all the services offered to residential customers – such as Internet access, VoIP, IPTV and Video-on-Demand. As such, the RGW constitutes an ideal candidate for virtualization, potentially relieving the NSP from such problems while also providing benefits to end-users. This chapter discusses the rationale and proposes an architecture for a virtualized Residential Gateway (vRGW) that physically removes the RGW from the customer premises, moving it into the operator data center or other logical point-of-presence, as a virtualized entity. This solution potentially reduces deployment, maintenance and operation costs, whilst improving overall performance, flexibility, reliability and manageability – both for the access network infrastructure and for the services provided over this infrastructure.