Protection based on backup radios and backup fibers for survivable Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) access network

In Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) access network, the optical back-end is vulnerable to the network component failure due to its tree topology. Any failure at the optical back-end may cause huge data loss. Thus, the survivability in FiWi is an important issue, especially the protection for the optical back-end. Some works propose to protect the optical back-end in FiWi by means of the wireless rerouting in the wireless front-end. However, these works cannot guarantee that there are always the available wireless paths for the traffic rerouting. In this paper, we divide the failures at the optical back-end into ONU-level failure and OLT-level failure according to the failure severity. To tolerate the ONU-level failure, we allocate each ONU a partner ONU and establish the wireless-backup-path between them by deploying backup radios on the traversed wireless routers. To tolerate the OLT-level failure, we cluster all segments in the network and place the backup fibers among the segments in each cluster to establish the protection ring. Thus, each pair of segments in the same cluster can backup for each other along the optical-backup-paths on the protection ring. We propose the heuristic algorithms to minimize the cost of backup radios and the cost of backup fibers. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are effective in enhancing the survivability of FiWi, while requiring less cost than the previous works.