Reliability analysis and evaluation for various protection schemes for FiWi networks

Today's generation need internet services at every step of life. Hence there is a requirement of a network which offers internet services in a flexible manner at an affordable cost. Available networks like passive optical networks (PON) and wireless mesh networks (WMN) provide services to the users with their own constraints, which results in either poor quality of services or higher cost. Therefore, to make a network with high quality of service at low cost, authors integrates the advantages of optical networks and wireless networks and called it as “Fiber Wireless Access Network (FiWi)”. A FiWi network offers higher bandwidth, better stability and flexibility to the users at relatively lower cost. The FiWi networks have PON at back end whereas WMN at front end. One of the key issues in FiWi networks is reliability of the network. Reliability of network components directly affects the survivability of the network. Hence in this paper we evaluate the reliability, recovery time and Mean Time Between Failure for various existing protection schemes viz. ring based protection scheme for multiple failures (RPMF), optimizing Back-up ONUs selection and backup fiber deployment (OBOF) and mesh scheme. Results show that among all the schemes, the performance of mesh scheme is better.