Adding mobile base station support to PONs

The continuing deployment of fiber in the local loop, presents an obvious opportunity to also provide backhauling to mobile base stations in the vicinity of Passive Optical Networks (PONs). To exploit this synergy, one must fully exploit the existing PON MAC tools and also ascertain that certain extreme performance requirements arising from the mobile traffic support can be met by the shared PON medium. This dual objective is addressed in this paper with performance simulations evaluating the most demanding scenario in terms of latency: i.e. that of the hard-handover exchange of messages via one PON over the core network. Also MAC fine-tuning techniques that can improve latency as well as system utilization in the presence of mobile traffic are presented and assessed.