Resilience enhancement of home gateways using failure analysis

A home gateway, the central equipment for a multipurpose communication system, is mainly composed of a router, a bridge and a broadband modem. It connects the private network to WANs for offering residential services like Internet access, VoIP, IPTV, etc. The challenges exist in delivering services with a high level of QoS, and could be worthy if there are mechanisms in the gateway itself to handle faults instantaneously. After analysing the field failure data, we present in this paper a generalized solution to handle faults in the router and diverse functional modules, e.g., NAT, DHCP server. In addition, we propose the architecture of a fault-tolerant home gateway which is efficient both in managing the faults and maximising the availability. To illustrate the operation of this enhanced architecture, its main components such as fault monitoring, bandwidth manager, session tracking, failure recovery, and traffic manager are described.