Converged Medium Access Control and Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation for Radio-Over-Fiber Networks

For supporting the upcoming applications, wireless mobile users require high bandwidth. To serve these requirements, a wireless network that has an optical backbone with a colossal bandwidth capacity is required. The radio-over-fiber (RoF) network is a promising solution that can provide high bandwidth. To accomplish this goal, we propose a converged medium access control (MAC) protocol for the RoF network, which uses a single-gate or multi-gate polling algorithm for time and wavelength allocation to the users. We propose an analytical delay model for single and multiple wavelength architectures, considering the user identification and data transfer delay for single-gate and multi-gate polling algorithms. We verify it with the results obtained from simulations. Finally, we present the mean delay and packet loss rate of the proposed algorithm by varying the user load and traffic burstiness and prove that the proposed algorithm gives better delay performance and a lower packet loss than the state-of-the-art algorithms.