Network Throughput Enhancement in Integrated Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) Access Networks

The integration of fiber and wireless (FiWi) network is considered to be one of the most promising solutions to provide ubiquitous, low cost, high bandwidth last mile Internet access. Though the optical subnetwork in a FiWi network can provide high bandwidth, the network throughput in a FiWi network still has a bottleneck due to the limited radio spectrum in the wireless subnetwork. This project aims to investigate effective approaches to improve network throughput in FiWi networks with hybrid WDM/TDM PON as the optical subnetwork and wireless mesh network (WMN) as the wireless subnetwork.Heterogeneous wireless clients are considered in such a FiWi network where some wireless clients may be surveillance video cameras which need to transmit videos to the Internet, some wireless clients may receive streaming video from the Internet, and some wireless clients may share files among them. In other words, upstream communication, e.g., from wireless clients to the Internet, downstream communication, e.g., from the Internet to wireless clients, as well as peer-to-peer communication, e.g., communication among wireless clients in a FiWi network, are all demanding.This project will strike to enhance the network throughput in a FiWi network with demanding upstream traffic, downstream traffic, as well as peer to peer communication. The proposed work fully investigates the unique features brought by the integration to improve the network throughput. The problems to be studied include:PON architecture and dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) protocol design to efficiently support peer-to-peer communication in a FiWi network;WMN routing and wavelength assignment in a FiWi network;online packet scheduling at the wireless clients to utilize the advantages of multi-path WMN routing and diminish the side-effect of multipath routing in network throughput; andonline packet dispatching at the OLT to further assure the in-order packet transmission in the core network.