A Novel Ethernet-Based Wired/Wireless Broadband Access Network

This paper proposes a novel Ethernet-based wired/wireless broadband access networking architecture that utilizes the existing wired trunk feeder fiber of typical PON (passive optical networks) infrastructure along with a hybrid FSO/RF (HFR), reliable wireless connectivity to the end users. The proposed architecture reduces the cost drastically as compare to conventional PON and provides 99.999% availability at range of 1 km in all weather conditions (S. Bloom, et al., 2002). Most of the previous work on HFR has only considered point to point communication links, where the main objective was to increase maximum distance covered by HFR link (G. Clark, et al., 2001), (E. J. Korewar, Nov. 1998), (P. F. Szajowski, et al., 1999). The proposed architecture is point to multipoint HFR networking architecture and to the best of our knowledge, is the first work that considers HFR in a networking environment to provide broadband access to the end-users. This is extension of our previous work (S. Ajaz, et al., 2006) to provide QoS (quality of service) to end users