Greening the copper with NFV, lower power optics from GreenTouch

The GreenTouch group, which researches less power-hungry networking technologies, is pitching an NFV-style home gateway architecture as one way to curb broadband networks' appetite for electrons.

The vendor-and-research partnership was set up in 2010, and now lists nearly 50 member organisations listed.

Leading its latest announcement is an architecture for home network gateways that suggests the smarts should be pulled into the network cloud to save energy; and a new approach to optical transceivers.

The Virtual Home Gateway project is led by a French team at the Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control. The idea is to deploy far dumber, simpler home gateways, a move GreenTouch reckons would slice 19 per cent from the power consumption of the residential access network.

Since most residential gateways are mostly left switched on 24x7, the group reckons that global adoption of the architecture would save the equivalent of more than 800,000 households' energy consumption each year.

Functions like controlling voice, data and TV access would consume less power by running on virtual machines in the cloud, the group believes, especially since in off-peak times machines that aren't doing anything, or services that aren't in use, could be spun down.

The other GreenTouch development announced today is an optical transceiver. Led by researchers from the University of Melbourne's Centre for Energy Efficient Telecommunications and Alcatel-Lucent, the point-to-point targets business and future residential in-home links.

The approach to power saving is straightforward: instead of all transceivers in a network operating at the same rated power, the CEET device adapts its power to the link, adjusting the transmitter down from maximum optical power to whatever is sufficient to maintain a transmission.

In the video below, CEET director Kerry Hinton says when applied to the residential scenario, the transceiver based on the CEET ASIC design would reduce wireline access energy consumption by 27 per cent – around 4 TWh of savings on a global scale. ®

Youtube Video