Improving the performance of FiWi networks through collaboration between ONU and APs

Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) Networks which are made up of fiber networks such as Passive Optical Networks (PONs) and wireless networks such as Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), can leverage the advantages of both types of networks, namely, the mobility support of users and high bandwidth. How-ever, the increased number of users causes long queuing delay in the Optical Network Unit (ONU) of FiWi networks. Conventional methods that allocate bandwidth to minimize queuing delay only work in the PON, and WLANs do not consider state of the ONU. Thus, we propose a cooperative method between the PON and WLANs, which takes into consideration the data rate allocated to the ONU and controls the amount of messages by the WLANs, to decrease the queuing delay at the ONU. We mathematically analyze the queuing delay of the conventional method and our proposed method. Then, we show that our proposed method can decrease the queuing delay and improve the performance of FiWi networks.