On converged Medium-Transparent MAC protocols for mm-wave fiber-wireless networks

This paper describes and summarizes the notion of medium-transparency in the access control protocols. Two versions of the Medium-Transparent MAC (MT-MAC) protocols have been presented to this day. The first is the pure Medium Transparent MAC (MT-MAC) that assigns optical capacity for equal time intervals to every Remote Antenna Unit (RAU) of the network. The second version is the Client-Weighted Medium Transparent MAC (CW-MT-MAC). The latter assigns wavelengths based on the number of active users that reside within each RAU, and for time proportionate to the latter, with the purpose of providing capacity fairness among the users. The CWMT-MAC exhibits greater performance and equalization regarding the achieved throughput and packet delay in the user basis regardless of the user population distribution in the network's RAUs. The results conclude that the medium transparent MAC protocols can operate successfully over converged Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) networks, confirming their flexibility and their capacity to form Wireless Local Area Networks in the 60GHz band even without Line-Of-Sight (LOS). In addition, the results show that the CW-MT-MAC alleviates the inter-user standard deviation in terms of throughput and packet delay, thus establishing its equalization and fairness properties.