Customer Premises Equipment Virtualization for Edge Network Redundancy
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current network virtualization technologies face challenges in efficiently managing resources and providing redundancy in edge customer premises equipment (CPE) to ensure seamless communication and data processing across diverse networks, particularly in scenarios where connectivity failures or high energy consumption are concerns.
Innovation Solution
Implementing virtual machine hosts with hypervisors that dynamically distribute processing, memory, and network functions across gateways, allowing for the selection of underutilized or geographically proximate CPEs to take over operations, and utilizing data caching to reduce latency and energy consumption by leveraging redundant communication paths and virtualization of network functions.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Use of energy by moving object
If virtualization is implemented in edge CPE to optimize resource utilization, then energy consumption is reduced, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The CPE system is segmented into multiple virtual machine instances, each capable of independent operation. This segmentation allows the system to distribute workloads across multiple lightweight virtual environments, reducing the energy consumption of individual components while maintaining overall system functionality through coordinated operation of the virtual machine host and guest instances
Solution Approach 2:
The virtual machine host is designed with multi-functionality to perform diverse CPE operations across different network domains. A single physical CPE can host multiple virtual machine instances that collectively provide routing, switching, and network address translation functions, thereby reducing the need for multiple dedicated physical devices and lowering overall energy consumption
2Reliability
If redundant CPE configurations are deployed to ensure seamless communication during connectivity failures, then network reliability improves, but resource utilization efficiency decreases
Solution Approach 1:
Multiple CPE instances are merged into a single virtual machine host, allowing redundant configurations to coexist in a shared physical environment. The virtual machine host coordinates these instances to provide seamless failover capabilities while efficiently sharing underlying hardware resources, thus maintaining high network reliability without the resource waste associated with completely separate redundant systems
Solution Approach 2:
Virtual machine guest instances are created as software copies of the CPE functionality, enabling rapid deployment of redundant configurations. These virtual copies can be instantiated, suspended, or migrated quickly to provide failover capabilities, ensuring network reliability while consuming fewer physical resources compared to hardware-based redundancy
Data Source
AI summary
A system is described that improves network function virtualization. The system facilitates an access point, such as a customer premises equipment, to utilize functionality of another access point when providing communication service to a device at a customer premises. The other access point may be a customer premises equipment at a neighboring premises. The access point may utilize the neighboring access point in case the access point is in a power saving state. Alternatively or in addition, the access point may use the other neighboring access point based on bandwidth availability, processing capability, memory capacity, or other attributes, or a combination thereof of the neighboring access point. In yet another example, the access point may utilize the neighboring access point in case of a failure in connection between the access point and a network provider.