A Joint Routing and Channel Assignment Scheme for Hybrid Wireless-Optical Broadband-Access Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate mechanisms for improving the quality of communications in wireless-optical broadband access networks (WOBAN), which present a promising solution to meet the growing needs for capacity of access networks. This is achieved by using multiple gateways and multi-channel operation along with a routing protocol that effectively reduces the effect of radio interference. We present a joint route and channel assignment scheme with the objective of maximizing the end-to-end probability of success and minimizing the end-to-end delay for all active upstream traffic in the WOBAN. Performance evaluations of the proposed scheme are presented using ns-2 simulations, which show that the proposed scheme improves the network throughput up to three times and reduces the traffic delay by six times in presence of 12 channels and four network interface cards (NICs), compared to a single channel scenario.

Keywords

• optical networks
• wireless mesh networks
• access networks
• quality-aware routing
• channel assignment
• genetic algorithms