Zero-watt Networked Standby: Reducing Power Consumption of Home A/V Network Systems

Energy conservation is an important global issue. The home is the third largest energy consumer, and 10% of the home energy use is standby power of home appliances. The proliferation of home networks increases the standby power. The conventional technologies for low networked standby power such as WoL require continuous AC power, as much as 0.5 watts, to monitor wake-up signals. A large portion of the consumed power is due to the power loss in the AC-DC converter. Moreover, the technologies are applicable only to the specific network types such as Ethernet and IEEE802.11. We propose a solution to reduce the networked standby power down to zero virtually, regardless of the network type. For monitoring wake-up signals, the solution utilizes the pre-charged power in an ultra capacitor without using the AC power supply for almost all the time. In order to realize this idea, the solution also utilizes a unique and simple protocol dedicated only to the networked standby/wake-up functionality. This protocol enables the monitoring circuit to consume a very small amount of power, small enough for the capacitor to supply. The networked standby/wake-up functionality is easily combined with any conventional network application protocol by protocol address mapping. As one realization example of our solution, we implemented an experimental home A/V system which is integrated with an ultra low power wireless signal receiver and extended UPnP protocol. The system evaluation showed that our solution achieves the zero-watt networked standby while keeping network functionalities. Moreover, the analysis of the results based on a statistical survey shows that the practical networked standby power is 30 mW when our solution is applied to a TV system, which corresponds to one seventeenth of a conventional technology, WoL. It means that our solution improves power consumption by 22% which corresponds to 1.11 kg-CO2 emission reduction per year per product.