Alleviating the high propagation delays in FiWi networks: a prediction-based DBA scheme for 10G-EPON-WiMAX systems

Fiber Wireless (FiWi) networks constitute a very promising, cost-effective solution to cope with modern demanding services and applications in access networks. One of the most challenging objective lies in the design of a robust, efficient and effective bandwidth allocation. The design of such a Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation (DBA) scheme should take into account the large propagation delays between mobile users and the Central Office (CO). In this work, we endeavor to address this challenge by proposing a prediction-aware DBA scheme for FiWi networks, where the optical domain is implemented by a 10Gbps Ethernet PON (10G-EPON) and the wireless domain is supported by WiMAX access stations. In order to ensure an effective DBA scheme a hidden Markov chain model is devised for estimating the surplus traffic requests of each mobile user during the coordination message exchange between the optical and the wireless domains. In addition, a fair bandwidth distribution is applied based on the results of the prediction module. Based on the obtained simulation results the proposed scheme presents a good network performance in terms of prediction accuracy and packet delay.