Virtualization of Residential Gateways

The residential gateway (RGW) is a key infrastructure component in home networks. Nowadays, the Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi) seems to be the only platform alternative supporting hot-plug of services and an easy way to deploy new ones which are capable to integrate heterogeneous devices into a common platform. But this platform can be managed by only one manager in a secure way, and this is limiting possible business models. The problem can be solved virtualizing the OSGi platform in such way that service providers can manage the RGW, and have full control over the services that they have installed, without conflicting with other service providers. This paper presents a general architecture for the virtualization of OSGi platforms that are running in a RGW.