Design and Implementation of Cooperative Network Connectivity Proxy Using Universal Plug and Play

Abstract

Abstract.Reducing the network energy waste is one of the key challenges of the Future Internet. Many Internet-based applications require preserving network connectivity for getting incoming remote service requests or confirming their availability and presence to remote peers by sending periodic keep-alive or heart-beating messages. Billions of dollars of electricity is wasted every year to keep idle or unused network hosts fully powered-up only to maintain the network connectivity. This paper describes a new approach to design and implement the cooperative Network Connectivity Proxy (NCP ) for reducing energy waste in the ever-growing future Internet. The NCP is implemented using Universal Plug and Play (UPnP ), that uses a set of protocols to allow seamless discovery and interaction between the network hosts and the NCP. The NCP allows all registered network hosts to transition into the low power sleep modes and maintains the network connectivity on their behalf. It handles basic network presence and management protocols like ICMP, DHCP, ARP etc on behalf of the sleeping network hosts and wakes them up only when their resources are required. Depending on the network hosts time usage model, the NCP can provide about 60 to 70% network energy savings.

Network Connectivity Proxy: Architecture, Implementation, and Performance Analysis

“…3 We have introduced a service type of NetworkConnectionProxy:1 and a service identifier of NetworkConnectionProxy1 for the NCP; we have defined the full list of actions (name, arguments, types of data, allowed values, and default values) needed to implement the communication interface. Further details about the usage of UPnP in the NCP framework are available in previous papers [8].…”

“…In this paper, we propose a framework that includes a set of basic and general routines that the NCP carries out on behalf of its clients and a suitable communication interface [8]- [10]. We also describe the current implementation of the framework, which runs both on stand-alone devices and network equipment (home gateway) and which also deals with practical matters such as the presence of private addresses, i.e., it manages Network Address Translation.…”

Saving energy by delegating network activity to home gateways

“…The NCP interface can be formalized as a UPnP service provided by the Internet Gateway device [24]. The actions of this service shall basically match the operations that client devices can demand to the NCP, plus some additional issues, like withdraw of previously registered rules, transfer of protocol or application data (e.g., TCP state information to migrate the session), and notification of sleep/active mode [25].…”

Improving Smartphones Battery Life by Reducing Energy Waste of Background Applications

“…In this paper, we propose the ASP concept to achieve this objective. The ASP is the continuation of our previous work on NCP, which impersonates the presence of desktop computers during their sleeping periods [5], [6]. Unlike the NCP, the ASP maintains only the applications presence as the smartphones are always powered-up devices.…”

“…The ASP offloads complete applications to another network device to extensively reduce the load on smartphone resources. The ASP concept is basically the extension of our previous work on the Network Connectivity Proxy (NCP) for desktop computers [5], [6]. The NCP maintains presence of desktop computers during their sleeping periods.…”