White Paper: Low-Power Network Standby in the Home and Office

Offices have long been networked, but the home is becoming an increasingly electronic and networked place. As the public demands (and governments mandate) an energy-efficient home, and everything from TVs to printers and refrigerators becomes networked, the energy consumption of these devices becomes critical. Most of these networked edge devices spend the majority of their time idle, but still need to remain present on the network. This creates the need for a new energy conservation technique—minimizing power while network-connected and idle—but the devices still need to be ready to respond at a moment’s notice. This paper analyzes the nature of embedded computing systems, reviewing system-level power optimizations to minimize network standby power. Then, in the context of low-power embedded systems in the home and office, we investigate and propose three ways to handle the network traffic at the heart of a lowpower network standby system—packet classification, packet accumulation and autorespond proxies.