DefinePK

Abstract

The convergence of optical and wireless technologies holds great promise for the development of future broadband access networks. As such, we work on the idea of integrating the gigabits passive optical network (GPON) with infrastructure-based wireless local area network (WLAN) to realize fiber-wireless (Fi-Wi) networks. The study focuses on the enhancement of the wireless side which is seen as the critical bottleneck because the wireless channel is shared by all WLAN access points (‘closed system’). The binary exponential backoff (BEB) algorithm in the standard WLAN is the key factor that leads to the throughput degradation and the unfairness between uplink and downlink transmissions. Therefore, two techniques are proposed to overcome the limitations and improve the end user performance in a non-saturated condition. The first technique exploits the accessible content of the GPON control frame and modifies the legacy BEB scheme by introducing optimum constant contention window (CW) sizes. The second technique is a transmission priority scheme that provides symmetric uplink and downlink transmissions for wireless users (WU) and their serving access points (AP).