Revisiting the Concept of Virtualized Residential Gateways

A diversity of technical advances in the field of network and systems virtualization have made it possible to consolidate and manage resources in an unprecedented scale. These advances have started to come out of the data centers, spreading towards the network service provider (NSP) and telecommunications operator infrastructure foundations, from the core to the edge networks, the access network, and the customer premises LAN (local area network). In this context, the residential gateway (RGW) constitutes an ideal candidate for virtualization, as it stands between the home LAN and the access network, imposing a considerable cost for the NSP while constituting a single point of failure for all the services offered to residential customers. This chapter presents the rationale for the virtual RGW (vRGW) concept, providing an overview of past and current implementation proposals and discussing how recent technological developments in key areas such as networking and virtualization have given a competitive edge to a RGW virtualization scenario, when compared with traditional deployments.