Broadband Forum has completed work on the technical specifications for the first virtualized residential gateway as part of efforts to bring NFV to the home.
The Network Enhanced Residential Gateway specifications provide requirements for virtual customer premise equipment.
NFV-based residential gateways will allow operators to provision new services centrally from cloud infrastructures, eliminating the requirement to provision and attach new services directly to the gateways.
This will allow operators to deploy new services faster and personalize service packages for end-users, while ensuring quality of service on a per-device, per-user or per-service basis, the Broadband Forum said.
“This work is extremely significant because many broadband operators are already working on the delivery of some flavors of cloud-based virtual residential gateway services,” commented David Minodier, network architect at Orange, which led the development of the standard.
“NFV and SDN technologies allow the delivery of such innovative services from a PoP or data center to be envisaged, which was not possible before. [The standard] provides CPE manufacturers with a first set of specifications to ensure interoperability between the bridged residential gateway at the customer premises and the virtual gateway hosted in the Service Provider’s cloud infrastructure.”
The new specification forms part of the Forum's Broadband 20/20 initiative, which focuses on the development of new broadband home and business opportunities taking advantage of emerging technologies including SDN, NFV, the IoT and ultrafast access technologies.