Virtualization of Residential Gateways: A Comprehensive Survey

The residential gateway (RGW) is a key device, located in the customer premises, standing between the home network and the access network. It imposes a considerable cost for the operator and constitutes a single point of failure for all the services offered to residential customers–such as Internet access, voice over IP, IPTV, and video-on-demand. RGW virtualization promises to tackle these issues, but its success has been hampered by scalability and implementation restrictions. However, developments such as the rise of software-defined networking and network function virtualization technologies, together with the evolution of the access network, namely through the deployment of Fiber-to-the-Premises accesses, have finally enabled RGW virtualization in an unprecedented scale. In this paper we revisit the virtual RGW concept, considering its evolution up to the most recent proposals as well as future challenges and developments.