Operators are realising it does not make sense to move everything to the cloud. Some functions involving perhaps personal data security or local Internet of Things processes are better executed at home and a home network must still function if the cloud is unreachable.
This point has sometimes been lost in the debate over virtualisation, which we believe is about striking the right balance on the location of resources and intelligence between the operator’s external network, aka the cloud, and the digital home. Put another way, the operator’s service termination point is no longer the broadband router but the home gateway or set top box that lies beyond it orchestrating actions and managing storage inside the home. The drive towards virtualisation for greater efficiency and more rapid deployment of new functions or services applies equally across this whole infrastructure and not just in the operator’s external domain where it can exert total control.
There is also some confusion over the reasons for virtualisation and the two other technologies which are SDN (Software Defined Networks) and NFV (Network Functions Virtualisation). Virtualisation cannot deliver new functions or services otherwise not possible. The benefits of virtualisation lie more under those two headings of cost saving and speed to market, which indeed may in practice usher in services that would not have been able to be deployed otherwise.
This leads directly to the reason why virtualisation must extend to the home gateway. It is absolutely key to keep up the innovation pace in the home gateway. The challenge lies in software development and more especially in its subsequent integration and testing. This is not directly addressed by NFV that just separates out the actual processes and does not tackle the underlying hardware. For this reason home gateway hardware virtualisation has become absolutely critical to flexibility and speed of deployment in the home network.
Extending NFV into to the digital home is a means to also bring some advantages of the cloud to the CPE. This can mean relocation of CPE features to the cloud. Users can for example control room temperature from within the home but also on public transport, on their way home. We see this as “cloud empowering” of home devices. With proper hardware virtualisation, features can also migrate from one device to another so an operator can for example move the external USB storage feature from the STB to the HGW.
NFV can work in tandem with whose driving principle is to separate the decisions about where traffic is sent (the control plane) from the underlying infrastructure that routes the traffic (the data plane). In combination NFV and SDN can yield an infrastructure based on commodity hardware that can execute network functions such as load-balancing, packet forwarding, DNS and NAT under centralized control, making it much easier to update and deploy new services within a controlled network that extends to the digital home. Virtualisation is a way to future-proof network architecture as these network functions may need to be migrated back into the home or elsewhere in the future.
By decoupling software and hardware the physical home gateway can be bridged to a virtual counterpart within the cloud. It is this decoupling that allows home gateway functions, including content security or user authentication to be distributed as desired between the home network and the external cloud.
This brings service agility and overall infrastructure flexibility. The future as we see it involves a shifting balance or equilibrium between the digital home and the cloud, with resources and functions migrating both ways between them as technology evolves.
For example rate adaptive streaming (ABR), used by all OTT video services, puts onus on the client that is responsible for managing the user experience. Cloud-based video servers become mere data stores that the client accesses how and when it chooses. This shows that the issue is not to put processing or storage at any specific point in the distribution chain but to have the flexibility to locate it where needed.
With SoftAtHome’s help some major operators such as Orange and Swisscom have already bought into this vision of the home network with hardware-independent software platforms powering their home gateways. We will continue to develop our SoftAtHome Operating Platform (SOP) 7 platform in line with this vision and follow a software-based roadmap for services with a hardware abstraction layer.
