Network game based routing for energy efficient Fibre-Wireless access networks

The currently growing demand for information and communication technologies (ICTs), and multimedia services, is generating a fast expansion of digital traffic. To fulfill such demands, new generation access architectures have been proposed that try to integrate and optimize available technologies. Besides allowing new services to emerge, such architectures also offer a great opportunity to develop new methods that try to increase energy efficiency by proper equipment management and sharing of resources. Here we focus on energy saving in Fibre-Wireless (FiWi) access networks, which provide high bandwidth and ubiquity to future multimedia services and applications. The goal is to exploit the path diversity of mesh FiWi networks to improve energy efficiency. A model based on network formation game theory is developed, creating ground for energy efficient routing algorithms. To obtain stable and efficient networks, the use of a new stability concept, which avoids unconnected nodes, is proposed and a dynamic network formation process is presented and applied to the model. Our results show that significant energy efficiency gains can be obtained. It is also shown that gateway placement can have a strong impact on energy efficiency.