The greening potential of content delivery in residential community networks

In this paper we focus on a Residential Community Network (RCN) in which the various home gateways have (limited) caching capabilities, can be shared among the users, and can exploit multi-hop wireless paths to communicate with each other. We analyse such a RCN from an energy-aware perspective, investigating its energy-saving potential in delivering the contents to the end users. To this aim, we define a resource allocation and routing scheme and, by means of an integer linear programming model, we solve to optimality the problem of associating the user terminals to the home gateways and computing the data flow paths. Accordingly, the resulting allocation pattern can serve as an upper bound for the global "greening" capability of the RCN. A comparison between our method and other techniques for resource sharing in RCNs sheds light on the pros and cons of both our scheme and the other approaches.