Network Planning for Next-Generation Metropolitan-Area Broadband Access under EPON-WiMAX Integration

This paper tackles a fundamental problem of network planning and dimensioning under EPON-WiMAX integration for next-generation wireless metropolitan-area broadband access. Due to the powerful coordination capability of the optical line terminal (OLT), inter-cell collaboration through physical layer cooperative transmission (CT) among the optical network unit-base stations (ONU-BSs) can be initiated. In order to achieve the most efficient deployment of network infrastructure and meet the long-term performance requirements, the proposed planning and dimensioning model jointly considers the problems of ONU-BS placement, BS-User (BU) association, and resource breakdown assignment (RBA), which are further formulated into a combinatorial optimization problem. To linearize the problem formulation, an approach based on decomposition and Special Ordered Set of Type 1 (SOS1) remodeling method is developed such that the reformulated problem can simply be solved by CPLEX. Case studies are conducted to demonstrate the performance gain in terms of total infrastructure cost and spectra efficiency against the case without considering collaboration among the ONU-BSs and optimal RBA.