Reliable and cost effective all-optical wireless architecture for a broadband access network

The conventional fiber-wireless (FiWi) network integrates a fiber-based back-end with a wireless-fidelity (WiFi)-based front-end in passive optical network architecture. Free-space optics (FSO) has recently been explored as a cost-effective alternative to optical fiber. Moreover, light fidelity (LiFi) is also emerging as a complementary technology to WiFi for indoor communication due to its ease of deployment and large unlicensed spectrum. This paper explores the benefits and trade-offs of integrating the FSO-based back-end with the LiFi-based front-end for an active optical network (AON). We have simulated multiple possible integration architectures of the FSO/fiber-based back-end with the LiFi/WiFi-based front-end. Moreover, to further improve system performance, we explore link aggregation, wherein users can receive data concurrently from both WiFi and LiFi access points. We evaluate and compare these proposed architectures in terms of average throughput, deployment cost, cost-per-bit, fairness, and reliability against conventional FiWi architecture. In addition, we present an analytical framework to estimate the outage probability of the hybrid FSO-LiFi architecture in which the FSO-based back-end network in AON architecture is integrated with a LiFi-based front-end. The obtained simulation results demonstrate the potential of this proposed hybrid architecture over conventional FiWi architecture.