Addressing the interdependence in providing fair and efficient bandwidth distribution in hybrid optical‐wireless networks

The convergence of optical and wireless technologies may offer a compelling network access infrastructure because these technologies combine major benefits such as large coverage in the wireless part and huge bandwidth in the optical part of the converged access network. The convergence of the passive optical networks with 4G wireless standards, such as the Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access and the Long Term Evolution, constitutes a quite attractive solution to meet the challenges of the modern bandwidth‐hungry access networks. One of the most important objective a modern access network has to address is the adequate bandwidth distribution to the final users. In addition, several other aims are emerged towards this goal, such as fairness and quality of service provisioning. The adversity of designing an efficient bandwidth distribution scheme for hybrid optical‐wireless access networks lies in the interdependence of both domains: the bandwidth distribution in the wireless domain depends on the optical transmission grant opportunities, while the bandwidth coordinator in the optical part has to be aware of the mobile user heterogeneity in the wireless domain. Moreover, the bandwidth decision‐making module in both networks has to be aware of providing a fair allocation independently of the number of mobile users or the traffic requests in the network. In this work, we endeavor to address the aforementioned challenges. A novel, fair, and efficient bandwidth distribution scheme is proposed for hybrid optical‐wireless access networks. By using weighted fairness provisioning techniques, the proposed scheme intends to alleviate the interdependence of the two domains, offering a fair and efficient bandwidth distribution to the mobile users. The weights are properly defined, by utilizing suitable optimization techniques such as the Lagrange multiplies, so as to incorporate the underlying features of each traffic requests, such as the population density and the propagation delay. Extensive simulation results indicate the capability of the proposed scheme, compared with other competitive allocation schemes, in provisioning a more efficient and fair bandwidth distribution in terms of latency, throughput, and packet drop ratio. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.