By Frank Sandoval, Pajarito Technologies, LLC
Specification of the Generic Access Platform is currently underway (Summer 2020) within SCTE, with broad participation of cable operator and vendor communities. In addition to the requirements for modularity and flexibility driving the effort, the platform will offer unprecedented communications to monitor and control the device and power management is an important feature in those communications.
The cable access network accounts for the vast majority of energy consumed by cable broadband providers, due to the very large number of devices in the outside plant. Measuring energy consumption deep into the network provides a number of business and customer-facing benefits, and the possibility of optimizing electrical usage under certain scenarios offers a glimpse of a more energy efficient, cost efficient, and reliable network.
This paper will briefly introduce GAP and the network configuration (NETCONF) protocol used for its communications, and dive into the SCTE-216 APSIS standard that will provide the power management facilities. APSIS - the Adaptive Power Systems Interface Specification has been developed by the cable operator community and published by the SCTE to provide a comprehensive and flexible data model to represent energy metrics and controls. By adopting a standard data model, costs can be driven out of the data supply chain, and this data can be merged across multiple platforms. A number of APSIS based energy use cases have been developed by the industry, many of which can be directly supported by GAP.
Finally, some suggestions for next steps for the industry will be outlined.