Designing stand-by gateway for managing a waste of networked home-device power

Abstract

The Internet protocols were designed when there were relatively few devices connected to the Internet and these devices were in use most of the time. Studies show many of these computers especially in home have their power management features disabled in order to maintain their network presence and network connections. Past research proposes to use a low power proxy to “stand in” for a computer, allowing it to go to sleep and thus save power while still maintaining its network presence. This paper describes an experimental stand-by gateway that can be used to develop the requirements for such a proxy. With the stand-by gateway, we propose to develop a language to be used by applications to provide the necessary code to the proxy to maintain network connections and presence for a sleeping computer. And we investigate the possibility of putting various components on home gateway to sleep during periods of low traffic activity. Out results show that sleeping is indeed feasible in the home network