Network end-user devices such as laptops and desktop PCs are often left powered ON 24/7 while they remain idle most of the time. The main reason behind this is maintaining network connectivity for remote access, VoIP, instant messaging and other Internet-based applications. The Network Connectivity Proxy (NCP) emerged as a quite promising strategy for significantly reducing network energy waste by allowing devices to sleep without losing their presence over Internet. It impersonates presence of devices during their sleeping periods at all layers of TCP/IP stack. The NCP can successfully proxy basic networking protocols (e.g., ARP, PING, DHCP, etc.) but faces challenges in proxying TCP sessions and proprietary closed-source applications with encrypted packets.To overcome the limitations of NCP concept, this paper proposes a new strategy for reducing network energy waste through intelligent coordination among a user's devices (e.g., smartphone, laptop, desktop PC, etc.). In the proposed system, a user's daily used devices autonomously and seamlessly communicate with a centralized control server that decides which user device will maintain presence of applications at a given instant. To allow devices to sleep and wake them up whenever necessary, the proposed system also uses a light-weight Home Gateway Proxy (HGP) with very basic set of practically realizable features. The communication framework for HGP is designed to achieve auto-discovery, seamless networking and communication features. This paper also practically evaluates the proposed system and estimates energy saving for fixed as well as mobile network devices.
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