Efficient routing and resource sharing mechanisms for hybrid optical-wireless access networks

The integration of passive optical networks (PONs) and wireless mesh networks (WMNs) into Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) networks has recently emerged as a promising strategy for

providing flexible network services at relative high transmission rates. This work investigates the effectiveness of localized routing that prioritizes transmissions over the local gateway to the optical network and avoids wireless packet transmissions in radio zones that do not contain the packet source or destination. Existing routing schemes for FiWi networks consider mainly hop-count and delay metrics over a flat WMN node topology and do not specifically prioritize the local network structure. The combination of clustered and localized routing (CluLoR) performs better in terms of throughput-delay compared to routing schemes that are based on minimum hop-count which do not consider traffic localization. Subsequently, this work also investigates the packet delays when relatively low-rate traffic that has traversed a wireless network is mixed with conventional high-rate PON-only traffic. A range of different FiWi network architectures with different dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) mechanisms is considered. The grouping of the optical network units (ONUs) in the double-phase polling (DPP) DBA mechanism in long-range (order of 100~Km) FiWi networks is closely examined, and a novel grouping by cycle length (GCL) strategy that achieves favorable packet delay performance is introduced. At the end, this work proposes a novel backhaul network architecture based on a Smart Gateway (Sm-GW) between the small cell base stations (e.g., LTE eNBs) and the conventional backhaul gateways, e.g., LTE Servicing/Packet Gateway (S/P-GW). The Sm-GW accommodates flexible number of small cells while reducing the infrastructure requirements at the S-GW of LTE backhaul. In contrast to existing methods, the proposed Sm-GW incorporates the scheduling mechanisms to achieve the network fairness while sharing the resources among all the connected small cells base stations.