Network Protocol based Power Management Architecture and Method in Always-On Home-Network devices

Aggregated power consumption of homenetwork devices such as home-gateway, home-server, settop box is rapidly increased because these devices are operated in powered-on state to support anyone, anywhere, anytime services. But power utilization of these devices is very low because there is much idle time under powered-on state. To reduce the overall power consumption in homenetwork, we are developing power-controlled homegateway which could be changed to standby-state when there are no actvie services and traffics. In this papare, we propose network-protocol based power management method and its architecture for our developing home-gateway. Proposed method maintains network informtion database at normal state, and set home-gateway into standby-state without loss of network connections or working contexts. Thus our proposed method and developing home-gateway can save power consumption dramatically in always-on home-network environments.