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Integrated Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) Access Networks Supporting Inter-ONU Communications

Yan Li, Jianping Wang, Member, IEEE, Chunming Qiao, Fellow, IEEE, Ashwin Gumaste, Member, IEEE, Yun Xu, and Yinlong Xu

AbstractIntegrated ber-wireless (FiWi) access networks provide a powerful platform to improve the throughput of peer-to-peer communication by enabling trafc to be sent from the source wireless client to an ingress optical network unit (ONU), then to the egress ONU close to the destination wireless client, and nally delivered to the destination wireless client. Such wireless-optical-wireless communication mode introduced by FiWi access networks can reduce the interference in wireless subnetwork, thus improving network throughput. With the support for direct inter-ONU communication in the optical subnetwork, throughput of peer-to-peer communication in a FiWi access network can be further improved. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid wavelength division multiplexed/time division multiplexed passive optical network (WDM/TDM PON) architecture supporting direct inter-ONU communication, a corresponding decentralized dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) protocol for inter-ONU communication and an algorithm to dynamically select egress ONU. The complexity of the proposed architecture is analyzed and compared with other alternatives, and the efciency of the proposed system is validated by the simulations. Index TermsDynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA), ber-wireless (FiWi), load balancing, passive optical network (PON), peer-to-peer, wavelength assignment, wireless mesh network (WMN).

I. INTRODUCTION

OWADAYS, access can mainly be divided into wired access and wireless access. Optical access which can provide huge bandwidth is an attractive wired access approach to meet the increasing bandwidth requirement, but it is costly to achieve deep ber penetration. Wireless access can support exible and ubiquitous communication in small community
Manuscript received November 30, 2008; revised June 20, 2009, August 23, 2009, and November 27, 2009. First published December 15, 2009; current version published March 05, 2010. This work was supported in part by the City University of Hong Kong under Grant 7002468. Y. Li is with the Department of Computer Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230000, China, and also with the Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong (e-mail: liyan94@mail.ustc.edu.cn). J. Wang is with the Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong (e-mail: jianwang@cityu.edu.hk). C. Qiao is with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 142602000 USA (e-mail: qiao@computer. org). A. Gumaste is with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, India Institute of Technology, Bombay 400076, India (e-mail: ashwing@ieee. org). Y. Xu and Y. Xu are with the Department of Computer Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230000, China (e-mail: xuyun@ustc.edu.cn; ylxu@ustc.edu.cn). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/JLT.2009.2038598

areas with a low deployment cost. However, interference and low bandwidth limit its deployment scalability. In light of the complementary properties of optical access and wireless access, integrated Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) access networks [1], [2] are gaining rapid popularity as a promising candidate for future access networks to achieve a perfect balance between provision of enormous access bandwidth and cost-effectiveness of infrastructure deployment. A FiWi access network consists of a wireless subnetwork as the front end and an optical subnetwork as the back end. In this paper, we will consider a FiWi access network with a wireless mesh network (WMN) [3] and a hybrid wavelength division multiplexed/time division multiplexed passive optical network (WDM/TDM PON) [4]. One of our design objectives is to support various types of communications using such a FiWi access network. For example, some wireless clients may be surveillance video cameras which need to transmit videos to the Internet, some wireless clients may receive streaming video from the Internet, and moreover, some other wireless clients may share les among them. Therefore, the FiWi access network must be able to efciently support upstream, downstream, and peer-to-peer communications. Given that the network throughput in a WMN is severely limited due to the interference in the wireless subnetwork, this paper will address the major challenges of how to utilize the high bandwidth provided by the optical subnetwork to efciently support peer-to-peer communication from one wireless client to another wireless client, which has been a focus in IEEE 802.11s standard [5]. Our idea is briey explained as follows. The integration of PONs and WMNs in FiWi access networks provides an opportunity to reduce the impact of interference on the network throughput. In a FiWi access network, peer-to-peer communication among wireless clients can be efciently carried through a wireless-optical-wireless mode where the trafc is sent from the source wireless client to an optical network unit (ONU), referred to as the ingress ONU, then the ingress ONU transmits the packet to another egress ONU, and at last the egress ONU delivers the packet to the destination wireless client [6]. Such a wireless-optical-wireless communication mode can potentially reduce the delay for some peer-to-peer communications since the transmission in the PON network can be much faster than that in the multi-hop wireless network. In order to efciently support peer-to-peer communication among wireless clients through the wireless-optical-wireless mode, efcient inter-ONU communication in the optical subnetwork must be supported. In a conventional PON, inter-ONU communication is carried through the optical line terminal (OLT) which may affect the transmission of upstream trafc

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and downstream trafc. In this paper, we investigate new approaches to supporting direct inter-ONU communication in a FiWi access network such that inter-ONU trafc does not have to go through OLT. The main issues addressed in this paper are listed below. WDM/TDM PON architecture design for efcient support of inter-ONU communication. In order to efciently support such wireless-optical-wireless peer-to-peer communication, a new WDM/TDM PON architecture design to support direct inter-ONU communication without the involvement of the OLT is needed. Wavelength assignment (and trafc grooming) in the optical subnetwork. Due to interference and limited bandwidth in the wireless subnetwork, trafc carried by each ONU to/from the wireless subnetwork is much less than the capacity provided by each wavelength. Therefore, multiple ONUs may share a wavelength through TDMA, which raises the issue of wavelength assignment (and trafc grooming). Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation (DBA) protocol design supporting inter-ONU communication. Dynamic bandwidth allocation protocol that determines which ONU (of a given group) can send/receive data on the bandwidth shared by other ONUs within the group plays an important role in supporting efcient inter-ONU communication. Dynamic ingress ONU and egress ONU selection and routing in WMNs. Dynamic selection of the ingress ONU and egress ONU for a pair of wireless clients will also play a role on reducing the interference, achieving load balance in the wireless subnetwork, and improving the throughput of DBA protocol. In this paper, we study the above fundamental problems in the optical subnetwork of a FiWi access network and our contributions are summarized as follows: We design a novel arrayed waveguide grating (AWG)based [7], [8] WDM/TDM PON architecture efciently supporting inter-ONU communication. To our best knowledge, the proposed architecture is the rst WDM/TDM PON supporting direct inter-ONU communication. Given the estimated trafc load arrived at ONUs from the wireless subnetwork, an efcient load balancing wavelength assignment which determines a subset of ONUs for each wavelength is proposed in this paper. We propose a new decentralized DBA protocol to support bandwidth allocation for inter-ONU communication. The proposed decentralized DBA protocol can maximize throughput and provide fairness among ONUs. The proposed FiWi access network supports dynamic egress ONU selection at the ingress ONU to reduce the delay of peer-to-peer communication among wireless clients. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II reviews the related work. Section III presents a WDM/TDM PON architecture supporting direct inter-ONU communication. Section IV discusses wavelength assignment. Section V proposes a decentralized DBA protocol to assure efcient communication among ONUs. Section VI presents dynamic egress ONU selection at the ingress ONU. Simulation results are presented in Section VII. We conclude the paper in Section VIII.

II. RELATED WORK AND PRELIMINARY KNOWLEDGE Related Work on PON Architecture Design Supporting Inter-ONU Communication: In conventional PON architectures, it is generally assumed that there is little inter-ONU trafc. Thus, inter-ONU communication is implemented by sending the trafc from the source ONU to the OLT, which then sends it back to the destination ONU [9]. This implementation, however, suffers from optical to electronic to optical (OEO) conversion delay and round-trip transmission delay. To accommodate the emerging need for direct inter-ONU communication, some PON architectures are developed to support such communication. In [10], [11], inter-ONU communication is conducted by broadcasting optical signals from one ONU to all ONUs through star coupler (SC) which is deployed at the remote node (RN). Such designs cause large power loss and can only be applied to TDM PON. The authors in [12] propose a WDM EPON architecture supporting direct inter-ONU communication in which upstream transmission and inter-ONU communication are alternately taken place, e.g., the transmission cycle is divided into two sub-cycles, one for upstream transmission, the other for inter-ONU communication, which makes it inappropriate for a FiWi access network with demanding upstream, downstream and peer-to-peer communication. In [13], a novel WDM PON with internetworking AWG, where is the capability is developed. A number of ONUs, is placed at the RN and two distributed bers are connected to each ONU in such architecture. Based on the cyclic property of AWG, direct inter-ONU communication can be implemented. In [13], if two ONUs are connected to the same port of the AWG router to share wavelength for inter-ONU communication, they can not receive signals from each other since the wavelength they use to transmit inter-ONU trafc can not be routed to the port they are connected to. Thus, this architecture can not be generalized to a hybrid WDM/TDM PON to act as the back end of FiWi access networks. Related Work on DBA Protocols: Many centralized or decentralized DBA protocols have been proposed for upstream transmission and downstream transmission in PON networks [14][17]. [12] proposes a centralized DBA protocol for inter-ONU communication where bandwidth allocation requests are sent to the OLT and bandwidth allocation grant is sent back to the ONUs from the OLT. Such an approach may affect upstream and downstream communication. On the other hand, this protocol is vulnerable to OLT failure since it depends on OLT to conduct bandwidth allocation. Related Work on Wavelength Assignment in WDM/TDM PON: A hybrid optical-wireless access network supporting load balancing with WDM/TDM PON as the optical subnetwork is proposed in [18]. ONUs can dynamically share wavelengths by tuning to different wavelengths. Such a dynamic wavelength sharing among ONUs is feasible because passive splitters are deployed at the RN, which is subject to power loss. In our proposed AWG-based WDM/TDM PON, ONUs sharing a common wavelength will receive/transmit signal from/to a specic port of the AWG. Thus, static wavelength assignment must be conducted to determine which ONUs are allocated into the same set.

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Fig. 1. WDM/TDM PON architecture supporting inter-ONU communication.

In this paper, we do not consider the specic routing in WMN. There are several routing algorithms have been proposed in FiWi access networks. Delay-aware routing in a FiWi access network has been studied in [19]. Capacity and delay aware routing in a FiWi access network is discussed in [20]. An integrated routing algorithm which can adapt to the change of overall demand among different service districts is proposed in [21]. Fault tolerant routing in a FiWi access network is considered in [22]. A LP-based routing algorithm for peer-to-peer communication among wireless clients is introduced in [6]. However, the algorithm proposed in [6] just selects the ONU which is the closest one to the destination wireless client as egress ONU. Such a selection of egress ONU may not result in high throughput due to the potential contention at the egress ONUs. In this paper, we consider dynamic egress ONU selection at ingress ONU to reduce the contention at the egress ONUs. Thus, higher throughput can be achieved. III. WDM/TDM PON ARCHITECTURE SUPPORTING INTER-ONU COMMUNICATION In this section, we rst introduce a new WDM/TDM PON architecture supporting direct inter-ONU communication, then compare the proposed architecture with existing PON architectures supporting direct inter-ONU communication. A. Overall Architecture We rst introduce the main optical components at the OLT, the RN and ONUs in our proposed WDM/TDM PON architecture as shown in Fig. 1. Suppose that there are ONUs and available wavelengths on each ber. At the OLT: An array of xed transmitters and an array of xed receivers are equipped for transmitting and receiving data by using a AWG. are assigned for upstream transmission, are used for downstream transmission and where FSR is the free spectrum range of the AWG. Note that though one may also use through for downstream as well, using through may simplify the design of the ONUs. At the RN: An passive combiner and a AWG are deployed at the RN as a wavelength router. Input port is used for both upstream and downstream trafc and input
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is used for data and bandwidth request of inter-ONU port communication. At each ONU: A pair of xed transmitter and receiver are equipped for upstream transmission and downstream transmission at designated upstream and downstream wavelengths, respectively. In addition, a tunable transmitter and a xed receiver are used for inter-ONU communication. More specically, the ONUs are partitioned into groups, and each group is associated with output port of the AWG and thus assigned wavelength and for upstream and downstream trafc, respectively. In addition, each group is assigned a wavelength for and for to receive inter-ONU trafc using a xed receiver. In order to send inter-ONU trafc to other groups, a tunable transmitter is used. For example, if any ONU would like to send trafc to the rst group, it has to tune its tunable transmitter to . The inter-ONU trafc from all ONUs are combined into one ber through an passive combiner which is connected to port of the AWG. Only one ONU can send trafc using a given at any given time, and this is controlled by the collision-free bandwidth allocation protocol to be described later. Similarly, collision-free transmission of upstream trafc on among all ONUs belonging to the same group is also ensured by using the bandwidth allocation protocol which is conducted at the OLT as conventional PON, which is not the focus of this paper. B. Comparison With Other PON Architectures Supporting Direct Inter-ONU Communication We now compare the proposed WDM/TDM PON architecture with two representative PON architectures [12], [13] discussed in Section II. For the simplicity of presentation, we use to refer to the architecture proposed in [12], to refer to the one in [13], and to refer to the one in this paper. We compare these three architectures from the following perspectives: Optical components at each ONU. Two distributed bers are connected to each ONU and four Txs/Rxs are equipped at each ONU in all three architectures. Optical components at the OLT. An array of receivers and an array of transmitters are equipped at the OLT for upstream transmission and downstream transmission in all

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Fig. 2. Architecture comparison.

AWG is employed at the OLT three architectures. An while a AWG is deployed at the OLT in for in routing upstream and downstream signals, where . However, a AWG is needed at the OLT in given its wavelength assignment. , only a small scale Optical components at the RN. In AWG and an AWG is needed at the RN. In , a SC are deployed at the RN. In , an combiner and a AWG are deployed as an optical router at the RN, where . Concurrent upstream and inter-ONU transmission. As we mentioned in Section II, in , concurrent transmission can not be supported given that upstream transmission and inter-ONU communication are alternately taken place. In both and , concurrent transmission can be supported by routing function at the AWG. Supporting decentralized DBA protocol. In , centralized DBA algorithm is conducted at the OLT. In both and , decentralized DBA protocol is supported given that the trafc request of each ONU can be broadcasted to all other ONUs independent of OLT. However, in , for one ONU, to receive request message from all other ONUs, it needs to tune its receiver onto different wavelengths frequently as each ONU will broadcast its request message on its xed wavelength. Since the size of request message is relatively small, the overhead and delay due to frequent tuning will be signicant in such a design. Supporting hybrid WDM/TDM PON. As we mentioned before, WDM/TDM PON is a desirable back end solution for FiWi access networks, which motivates us to design the WDM/TDM PON architecture . The WDM PON can not be generalized to an effective WDM/TDM PON since that concurrent upstream and inter-ONU transmission can not be supported. The WDM PON can not be easily generalized to a WDM/TDM PON which can support direct inter-ONU communication. In , if two ONUs are connected to the same port of the AWG router to share wavelength for inter-ONU communication, they can not receive signals from each other since the wavelength they use to transmit inter-ONU trafc can not be routed back to the port that they are connected to.
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The above comparison is summarized in Fig. 2. Through the above comparison, we can observe that our proposed architecture is a cost-effective WDM/TDM PON architecture for efciently supporting direct inter-ONU communication. IV. WAVELENGTH ASSIGNMENT IN WDM/TDM PON In this section, we introduce how to assign ONUs to wavelengths such that network throughput can be maximized. We assume that upstream trafc and downstream trafc are symmetric. For example, for a communication network, the resident subscribers may request symmetric upstream bandwidth and downstream bandwidth. Thus, we only need to consider the wavelength assignment in one direction. Suppose that there are ONUs in a PON network and there are available wavelengths for upstream transmission (downstream transmission). Let be the set of wavelengths. Let be the bandwidth provided by a wavelength. be the split ratio of a wavelength which means that one Let wavelength can be shared by at most ONUs, where we assume . Let be the estimated trafc load (mean value of trafc load) of where such information can be obtained statistically. Wavelength assignment is to assign ONUs onto wavelengths such that the trafc load on each wavelength is less than . Since the trafc load at each ONU is only estimated, in order to provide resilience to trafc uctuation, we prefer to keep enough residual bandwidth on each wavelength. In other words, load balanced wavelength assignment is preferred. Let be 1 if is associated with wavelength , otherwise be 0. The problem can be formulated as follows: (1) subject to:

(2)

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(3) (4) In the above formulation, the objective is to maximize the minimum residual bandwidth on all wavelengths. Since all wavelengths are associated with the same bandwidth , (1) can be rewritten as follows: (5) Equation (2) indicates that each ONU can only associate with one wavelength. (3) indicates one wavelength can be shared by at most ONUs and (4) shows that the trafc load on a wavelength can not be more than its capacity. The wavelength assignment problem is an NP-hard problem since the load balancing problem which is known to be NP-complete [23] can be reduced to the wavelength assignment problem. In this paper, we modify SortedGreedyLoadBalance algorithm which is used for load balancing problem to solve the wavelength assignment problem. The modied algorithm is . referred to as We would like to note that the proposed wavelength assignment is a static wavelength assignment, which determines which port of the AWG that each ONUs distributed ber should connect to. Thus, it is not suitable to change frequently. If the trafc prole in the wireless subnetwork changes dramatically such that some ONU groups are overloaded and some ONU groups are underutilized, we have the following approaches to resolve the unbalanced load among ONU groups: Adjust the trafc sent to each ONU through dynamic routing in the wireless subnetwork such that trafc among ONU groups are balanced. Relay trafc among ONU groups. Suppose that trafc in the ONU group using wavelength is more than the bandwidth that a wavelength can provide and trafc in the ONU group using wavelength is far less than the bandwidth that a wavelength can provide, then ONUs using can send some trafc to ONUs by using which will then send the trafc to the OLT. In other words, we can use inter-ONU communication scheme proposed in this paper to shift trafc from one ONU group to another such that high network throughput can be achieved. Algorithm 1 Initialize all ; ;

TABLE I NOTATIONS USED IN THE DBA PROTOCOL

V. DECENTRALIZED DBA PROTOCOL FOR INTER-ONU COMMUNICATION Since multiple ONUs may request to communicate with the ONUs which are in the same set simultaneously, collision may happen. Therefore, bandwidth allocation protocol is needed to assure efcient inter-ONU communication. Furthermore, to protect the communication against the OLT failure, decentralized DBA protocol is desirable since centralized protocol depends on the OLT to conduct bandwidth allocation. In this section, we propose a decentralized bandwidth allocation protocol which is based on the proposed WDM/TDM PON architecture for inter-ONU communication. We rst introduce the general framework of the proposed decentralized DBA protocol and the parameters used in this section, then introduce how request message is generated and transmitted, and how DBA algorithm is performed at each ONU. We summarize the properties of the proposed decentralized DBA protocol at last. A. General Framework of Decentralized DBA Protocol The proposed decentralized DBA protocol works in a synchronized manner where request message transmission is followed by data transmission in each transmission cycle. In each transmission cycle, at most ONUs are able to transmit data to their destination ONUs. The general framework of our decentralized DBA protocol includes the following three stages in each transmission cycle: Transmitting request messages. In this stage, the request message from each ONU will reach all other ONUs including the ONUs in its own group. We will introduce the format of request message and the mechanism of transmitting request messages shortly. Executing bandwidth allocation algorithm. In this stage, based on the gathered request messages, each ONU will independently execute the same decentralized bandwidth allocation algorithm which will be introduced shortly. Transmitting data. During this period, ONUs will send trafc to other ONUs according to the decision made by the bandwidth allocation algorithm. B. Request Message Construction and Transmission We now introduce how request messages are constructed and transmitted. The notation used in the DBA protocol is given in Table I. Each source ONUs weight is initially set . If has backlogged trafc and loses the bid at to be current transmission cycle, is updated to , otherwise is reset to .

Sort ONUs by decreasing trafc load, For For to ; to ;

Choose with and the minimum value of Set ;

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At the beginning of one transmission cycle, we assume that each ONU has selected a destination ONU according to intra-ONU scheduling [24], [25] which schedules trafc is the selected destination of queued at the ONU. If in current transmission cycle, the request message of includes the following information , where are the indexes of source ONU and destination ONU, has no trafc respectively. In one transmission cycle, if to other ONUs, e.g., , the request message of is depicted as to avoid the illusion that the request message of is lost. The key challenge of transmitting the request messages is that the request message from each ONU needs to reach all other ONUs. However, such a broadcast nature is hard to be satised since ONUs receive inter-ONU request message and data on xed and different wavelengths. In this paper, we propose a pipeline approach to broadcast inter-ONU request messages. Before we introduce the mechanism of request message transmission for the general case where there are multiple ONUs in and there each group, we start with a simple case where is only one ONU in each group. In such a case, request message transmission period is divided into time slots. In the rst time slot, each ONU sends its own request message to its adjacent next ONU, e.g., sends its request message to where if and if . From time slot 2 to time slot , each ONU forwards its received request message in the previous time slot to its adjacent next ONU. According to such a pipeline approach, s request message reaches in time slot . At the end of time s request message will reach . Thus, slot all other ONUs have the request message of at the end of time slot . Since transmissions in groups can take place simultaneously, after time slots, each ONU receives the request messages of all other ONUs. When there are multiple ONUs in each group , request message from an ONU also needs to reach other ONUs in the same group. We need time slots to nish broadcasting request messages. For each group , we have the following two phases: In the rst phase, each ONU in group has one time slot to and sends its request message to all tune to wavelength ONUs in its adjacent next group, group , where if or if . In other words, after time slots, group s adjacent next group has the bandwidth requests from ONUs in group for . All these request messages are buffered at each ONU. In the second phase, one ONU in each group will represent the group to forward received request messages to its adjacent group. Without loss of generality, we assume that in group for will forward request message. In each time slot sends one of its received request messages which have not been forwarded to its adjacent next group. In the proposed request message transmission scheme, ONUs in a group only communicate with ONUs of its adjacent group. Thus, frequent tuning is avoided. We now use the following example to demonstrate how the proposed request message transmission scheme works. Suppose that 7 ONUs are divided into three ONU
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Fig. 3. Request message transmission in one transmission cycle.

and , and messages to and , respectively. In time slot 2, , and send their request messages to and , respectively. In time slot 3, and start to forward their received request messages in time slot 1 to their next groups respectively, and sends . In time its own request message to group slot 4, and start to forward their received request messages in time slot 2 and starts to forward its received request message in time slot 1. In time slot 5, 6, and 7, , and continue to forward received request messages. Such a request message transmission process is given in Fig. 3. groups, . In send time their slot 1, request C. Decentralized DBA Algorithm In this section, we introduce a decentralized DBA algorithm by which an ONU can determine whether it can send its trafc at current transmission cycle or not after receiving the request messages of all other ONUs. Since one ONU can send at most trafc to its destination in a transmission cycle, the maximum trafc amount that can be allowed to sent to its selected destination , e.g., , is set to be if , otherwise, . Suppose that the destination ONU of the request message originated from is , which belongs to group . For all request messages with destination ONU belonging to group , if has the highest values, can send trafc to , otherwise, changes its weight to its destination , and waits for the next transmission cycle. The proposed decentralized DBA protocol can achieve high network throughput and fairness: It can achieve high throughput. The protocol assures that if there is trafc destined to a group, one ONU will send trafc to that group. Among all ows destined for ONUs in the same group, if the source ONUs have continuously lost

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times, the ow with the highest trafc the bid for demand will be transmitted to its destination. Suppose that and have lost the bid for the same number of times and they select the destination ONUs in and . Suppose that the same group, , then we have , then will transmit the trafc. Thus, high network throughput can be achieved. It can resolve contention and break the tie. Among all ows destined for the ONUs in the same group, if the source times ONUs have continuously lost the bid for and these ows have the same trafc demand, the one with highest source ONU index will send its trafc to its destination since the weight of each source is set to be . It can assure fairness. If has continuously lost the bid for times, it will have higher priority than other ONUs which have continuously lost the bid for times. Suppose that has continuously lost the bid for times, its weight is updated to and its trafc demand is . Without loss of generality, we assume that has trafc demand and it has continuously lost the bid for times. We have . Thus, will have higher in current transmission cycle.
Fig. 4. Example of egress ONU selection.

priority than

VI. DYNAMIC EGRESS ONU SELECTION FOR PEER-TO-PEER COMMUNICATION AMONG WIRELESS CLIENTS If the destination ONUs of many requests belong to the same group, such requests contend for the same wavelength and inter-ONU communication may experience longer delay. As a result, peer-to-peer communication among wireless clients will experience longer delay. One remedy solution will be to dynamically determine the ingress ONU and egress ONU for peer-to-peer communication among wireless clients. In this paper, we assume that the ingress ONU for each pair of wireless clients to communicate through wireless-optical-wireless mode is given and we propose an algorithm to dynamically select egress ONU. The motivation is to select an egress ONU for each communication request between a pair of wireless clients such that the trafc load on the wavelength assigned to that egress ONU is light. To support dynamic egress ONU selection at ingress ONU, each ONU needs to maintain the following two tables: Trafc demand table. Each ONU will maintain a trafc demand table which records the volume of backlogged trafc destined to each group. Such information can be easily maintained with the obtained request messages and the result of decentralized DBA algorithm. Let be the current trafc demand on where is initially set to 0. After receiving request messages in one transmission cycle, is updated to , where denotes to rethe index of the wavelength which is used by ceive data from other ONUs. In one transmission cycle, if is allowed to send data to on , then is updated to .
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Candidate egress ONU table. Each ONU will maintain a candidate egress ONU table. For each wireless client maintains an entry in the table as the candidate egress ONUs for , where each candidate egress ONU can send trafc to the wireless client within relatively small delay. Such candidate egress ONUs can be determined by the routing in the WMN subnetwork, which is out of the scope of this paper. With the above information, when a packet arrives at its ingress ONU, if it is peer-to-peer trafc among wireless clients, the ingress ONU will check the destination wireless clientss candidate egress ONU. Since each candidate egress ONU can send trafc to the wireless client within relatively small delay, among all candidate egress ONUs, the one which receives inter-ONU trafc on the wavelength with the minimum backlogged trafc demand will be selected as the egress ONU for the packet. We now use an example shown in Fig. 4 to demonstrate dynamic egress ONU selection. Fig. 4(a) shows a FiWi access network in which and share wavelength to receive data from other ONUs while and share wavelength to receive data from other ONUs. For simplicity, we assume that there are ve wireless clients in WMN and a packet with destination arrives at . Fig. 4(b) shows the trafc demand table at when the packet arrives at . Fig. 4(c) shows the candidate egress ONU table at . In our example, will select as the egress ONU for the arrived packet. The reason is that the current trafc demand on wavelength (109 Mb) which is used by to receive inter-ONU trafc is much less than the current trafc

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TABLE II PARAMETERS FOR PHYSICAL LAYER

Fig. 5. Topology of simulated small scale FiWi.

demand on wavelength (156 Mb) which is used by receive inter-ONU trafc. VII. SIMULATION

to

In this section, we conduct the simulation to demonstrate the efciency of our work from the following perspectives: to demonstrate that supporting direct inter-ONU communication can further improve the system throughput of peer-to-peer communication in FiWi access networks. to demonstrate the effectiveness of wavelength assignment in the optical subnetwork. to compare the performance of the proposed WDM/TDM PON supporting direct inter-ONU communication with conventional WDM/TDM PON without supporting direct inter-ONU communication. to demonstrate the effectiveness of dynamic egress ONU selection for peer-to-peer communication among wireless clients. A. Simulation Setting In the simulation, we rst construct a small scale FiWi access network which is shown in Fig. 5 to show throughput enhancement brought by supporting direct inter-ONU communication in FiWi access networks. The simulation is conducted in ns-2.34, which is the most recent version of ns-2. In the WMN subnetwork of the constructed FiWi access network, there are two gateways (ONUs) (we assume that a single device integrates the functions of both ONU and gateway) and eight wireless mesh routers which are uniformly distributed in 400 200 m square region. Each ONU (gateway) manages a subregion with four mesh routers. DSDV protocol which is provided in ns-2 is used for wireless routing. Two CBR trafc ows, e.g., and , are generated in our simulation. To simulate the realistic wireless communication environment, we set the main parameters for wireless physical layer as shown in Table II. Each wireless mesh router equips a single 802.11a radio which works on 5.18 GHz frequency. TwoRayGround propagation model is selected for wireless channel. The physical date rate is set to 54 Mbps and 64-QAM is selected as
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our modulation scheme. The signal to noise ratio (SNR) is set to 10 dB to assure the bite error rate (BER) of wireless channel is about . We set the transmission power of each node to dB to create a communication range of approximately 120 meters. The sensibility range in our simulation is 400 meters dBm. The achievable data rate of 802.11a by setting CST to radio is no more than 10 Mbps in our simulation scenario, which is consistent with the result reported by other researchers using ns-2 simulator that maximum achievable data rate of 802.11a radio is around 17% of the raw data rate. The size of each wireless packet is set to 1000 bytes. The achievable throughout of the wireless subnetwork is less than 10 Mbps in the simulation. To fully utilize the bandwidth provided by the optical subnetwork, some xed end users can be connected directly to the ONUs for Internet access. To simulate such a deployment, we assume that each ONU has 2 wavelengths (one for upstream transmission and one for downstream transmission), each with 16 Mbps allocated bandwidth for the peer-to-peer wireless trafc from the constructed WMN and the upstream/downstream trafc from xed users/OLT. Since each ONU has one dedicated wavelength for inter-ONU communication and there are only two ONUs, the queueing delay experienced by inter-ONU trafc in this small scale FiWi access network only depends on the available bandwidth for inter-ONU communication and inter-ONU trafc will not experience queueing delay caused by contention to the same destination ONU from other ONUs. The propagation delay from the OLT to each ONU is set to 100 s. Each PON frame is set to be 15000 bytes. In the simulation, we assume that when a wireless packet arrives at an ONU, there is some trafc from other xed users or wireless clients and a PON frame is formed immediately for transmission. We note that if trafc arrived at the ONU is light and a PON frame can not be formed until enough wireless packets arrive, the performance gain of enabling wireless-optical-wireless mode and direct inter-ONU communication may be reduced. Since the proposed work to efciently support direct inter-ONU communication is independent of the specic setting and routing in wireless subnetwork, in order to demonstrate the efciency of proposed work in this paper, we then conduct simulations assuming that trafc from 100 wireless clients has been sent to 16 ONUs where these 100 wireless clients may belong to several different wireless networks. By making such assumption, we can clearly demonstrate the efciency of the proposed work independent of the underlying routing protocol in the wireless subnetwork and we can simulate larger trafc load. As we mentioned earlier, if inter-ONU trafc is carried by sending trafc to the OLT at rst and then transmitting back to the peer ONU, the impact of inter-ONU communication on upstream trafc is the same as that on downstream trafc. Thus, we only simulate upstream communication and inter-ONU communication in a WDM/TDM PON. In this part of the simulation, we simulate a larger PON network where there are

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Fig. 8. Mean packet queuing delay at ONU versus system trafc load. Fig. 6. Throughput of peer-to-peer communication versus system trafc load.

Fig. 9. Mean packet queuing delay at ONU versus system trafc load. Fig. 7. Mean end to end packet delay versus system trafc load.

16 ONUs operating on four different wavelengths each with capacity of 1 Gbps for upstream transmission and inter-ONU communication. ONUs in the same group will operate in TDMA mode to share wavelength for upstream transmission. The propagation delay between the OLT and ONUs varies in the interval of [50 s, 100 s]. We assume that trafc arrived at each ONU from the wireless subnetwork follows Poisson distribution. B. Simulation Results The results shown in Figs. 6 and 7 are based on the constructed small scale FiWi network. In both gures, we demonstrate the throughput enhancement and mean end-to-end delay reduction of peer-to-peer communication by supporting direct inter-ONU communication in FiWi access networks. In the optical subnetwork, a FiWi access network without supporting direct inter-ONU communication and the proposed FiWi access network supporting direct inter-ONU communication are simulated. It is obvious that peer-to-peer communication can be better supported in the FiWi access networks with enabling wireless-optical-wireless mode and the performance of peer-toAuthorized licensd use limted to: IE Xplore. Downlade on May 13,20 at 1:4923 UTC from IE Xplore. Restricon aply.

peer communication can be further improved by supporting direct inter-ONU communication. The following results are based on the constructed WDM/TDM PON with 16 ONUs. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed load balancing wavelength assignment in a WDM/TDM PON, we assume that each ONUs expected mean trafc load (or offered bandwidth) to each ONU is given. In the WDM/TDM PON, the ratio of upstream trafc to inter-ONU trafc is set to be 1:1. In order to simulate trafc burst, we assume that the actual trafc load of each ONU uctuates in the Mbps, Mbps]. Fig. 8 shows the mean range of [ packet queuing delay and corresponding condence interval with 99% condence probability under the uctuated trafc load. We compare the performance of balanced wavelength assignment with that of a naive wavelength assignment where four ONUs are assigned to share a wavelength regardless of their estimated trafc load. From Fig. 8, we can see that with load balancing wavelength assignment, trafc will experience less delay at ONUs even if the estimated trafc load has moderate uctuation. Fig. 9 shows that the mean packet queuing delay at ONUs in a conventional WDM/TDM PON which does not support direct inter-ONU communication and in the proposed WDM/TDM

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Fig. 10. ONU fairness versus system trafc load.

Fig. 11. Mean packet queuing delay at ONU versus system trafc load.

VIII. CONCLUSION PON supporting direct inter-ONU communication. We assume that the ratio of upstream trafc to inter-ONU trafc is 1:1. For the peer-to-peer trafc arrived at each ONU from the wireless subnetwork, we suppose that the egress ONUs are uniformly for simplicity. Fig. 9 distributed among shows that the mean packet queuing delay in the proposed WDM/TDM PON is less than that in conventional WDM/TDM PON. Furthermore, with the increase of network trafc load, this superiority is more and more signicant. We note the mean queuing delay shown in Fig. 9 is for peer-to-peer wireless users. In practical FiWi access networks, upstream transmission, downstream transmission and inter-ONU communication may simultaneously take place. Upstream and downstream trafc also benets from the capability of supporting direct inter-ONU communications, though these were not shown. Fig. 10 shows the fairness of the proposed DBA protocol for inter-ONU communication. We suppose that only inter-ONU trafc is generated and the egress ONUs are determined by uniformly distributing them among for simplicity. We use Jains fairness index [26] to estimate ONU fairness which varies from (worst case) to 1 (best case). As shown in Fig. 10, the good fairness can still be achieved even under high trafc load in the proposed DBA. In Fig. 11, we assume that 100 wireless destinations are deployed in the WMN subnetwork. Each ONU in a FiWi access network maintains a candidate egress ONU table. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed dynamic egress ONU selection, Fig. 11 compares the mean packet queuing of the proposed dynamic egress ONU selection with that of the closest egress ONU selection which selects the one close to the destination in candidate ONU list. It can be seen that the mean packet queuing delay of the FiWi access network with proposed dynamic egress ONU selection is smaller than the closest egress ONU selection. This is because that the proposed dynamic egress ONU selection considers the real-time trafc load at each ONU and always selects the egress ONU where the trafc load on the wavelength assigned to that egress ONU is light.
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One of the challenging issues in FiWi access networks is how to efciently utilize the high bandwidth provided in the optical subnetwork to improve the throughput of wireless subnetworks. In this paper, we focus on the relevant issues in the optical subnetwork in order to efciently support peer-to-peer communication among wireless clients in FiWi access networks. We propose a novel WDM/TDM PON architecture which supports direct inter-ONU communication and a decentralized DBA protocol to assure efcient inter-ONU communication. We also propose algorithms for wavelength assignment and dynamic egress ONU selection to improve network throughput. In conclusion, this paper presents innovative approaches to improve the throughput of peer-to-peer communication in FiWi access networks. REFERENCES
[1] N. Ghazisaidi, M. Maier, and C. M. Assi, Fiber-wireless (FiWi) access networks: A Survey, IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 160167, Feb. 2009. [2] M. Maier, N. Ghazisaidi, and M. Reisslein, The audacity of ber-wireless (FiWi) networks (invited paper), in Proc. ICST Int. Conf. Access Networks, Oct. 2008, pp. 1635. [3] X. Wu, J. Liu, and G. Chen, Analysis of bottleneck delay and throughput in wireless mesh networks, in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Mobile Adhoc and Sensor Systems (MASS), Oct. 2006, pp. 765770. [4] F. An, K. S. Kim, D. Gutierrez, S. Yam, E. Hu, K. Shrikhande, and L. G. Kazovsky, SUccess: A next-generation hybrid WDM/TDM optical access network architecture, J. Lightw. Technol., vol. 22, no. 11, Nov. 2004. [5] Paulson and L. Dailey, A new Wi-Fi for peer-to-peer communications, IEEE Comput. Soc., vol. 41, no. 6, pp. 1921, Jun. 2008. [6] Z. Zheng, J. Wang, and J. Wang, A study of network throughput gain in optical-wireless (FiWi) networks subject to peer-to-peer communication, in Proc. ICC, 2009, pp. 16. [7] J. Hasegawa and K. Nara, Ultra low loss athermal AWG module with a large number of channels, Furukawa Rev. 26 2004. [8] H. Takahashi, K. Oda, H. Tiba, and Y. Inoue, Transmissions characteristic of arrayed waveguide wavelength multiplexer, J. Lightw. Technol., vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 407433, Mar. 1995. [9] Y. Su, All-optical virtual-private-network in access networks, in Proc. LEOS, 2007, pp. 802803.

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Jianping Wang (M03) received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science from Nankai University, Tianjin, China, in 1996 and 1999, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2003. She is currently an Assistant Professor with the Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include optical networks and wireless networks.

Chunming Qiao (F10) received the B.S. degree in computer science and engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1985, the M.S. degree in computer science and engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1987, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, in 1993. He is currently a Professor with the State University of New York, Buffalo. His research interests include optical networks, wireless and mobile networks, survivable networks, and TCP/IP technologies.

Ashwin Gumaste (M04) received the Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2003. He is currently the James R. Isaac Chair in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering with the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. His research has been funded by vendors, providers, system integrators, and government agencies.

Yun Xu received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Hefei, in 2002. He is currently an Associate Professor with the Department of Computer Science, USTC, where he is leading a group of research students in some high-performance computing and bioinformatics research. His research interests include design and analysis of parallel algorithms, heterogeneous computing and multi-core processors, computing performance tuning, and biological sequence analysis and mining.

Yan Li received the B.S. degree in computer science from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Hefei, in 2006, where she is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree.

Yinlong Xu received the B.S. degree in mathematics from Peking University, Peking, China, in 1983, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Hefei, in 1989 and 2004, respectively. He is currently a Professor with the School of Computer Science and Technology, USTC, where he is leading a group of research students in some networking and high-performance computing research. His research interests include network coding, wireless network, combinatorial optimization, and design and analysis of parallel algorithm.

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