Virtualizing Customer Premises Equipment

Abstract

Business and residential gateways are customer premises equipment (CPE) devices that connect the customer network to the operator network. Being hampered by a traditional, device-centric, deployment approach, these devices are regarded as candidates for partial or full virtualization, with envisioned benefits in terms of simplified management, hardware costs, and streamlined service design. This demo presents a prototype vCPE environment demonstrating two distinct service models. First, a residential service with the virtualization of all functions on the operator’s infrastructure, representing most service deployments, which can easily scale to millions of customers. Second, a more business-oriented service model that uses a hybrid deployment scheme with a mixture of virtualized functions deployed both the operator side and in the customer premises, using physical gateways that still have some computational capacity. The seamless subscription of value-added functions to the service (for instance an ad blocker function) is also demonstrated.