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.
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