The Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) is focusing on energy management and quality of service at its meeting in Chicago this week as part of its strategy to develop a sustainable platform for the connected home embracing all devices including smart TVs. It is working with the ZigBee Alliance dedicated to home radio devices to develop standards for Home Energy management (HEM). This comes as HGI is on the verge of publishing the use-cases and overall architecture for HEM as agreed among its broadband service provider members along with home gateway manufacturers. The HGI is now setting specific requirements for support of these services within home gateways.
HEM builds on already published material aimed at reducing the energy consumed by broadband services. As part of this, the HGI will consider at its Chicago meeting how to optimise the power state of connected home devices both when in use and idle.
The Chicago meeting is also discussing for the first time the implementation of key performance indicators (KPIs) for home networking technologies, reflecting the importance of quality of service for video and other applications.
