QoS Provisioning Techniques for Future Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) Access Networks

Abstract: A plethora of enabling optical and wireless access-metro network technologies have been emerging that can be used to build future-proof bimodal fiber-wireless (FiWi) networks. Hybrid FiWi networks aim at providing wired and wireless quad-play services over the same infrastructure simultaneously and hold great promise to mitigate the digital divide and change the way we live and work by replacing commuting with teleworking. After overviewing enabling optical and wireless network technologies and their QoS provisioning techniques, we elaborate on enabling radio-over-fiber (RoF) and radio-and-fiber (R&F) technologies. We describe and investigate new QoS provisioning techniques for future FiWi networks, ranging from traffic class mapping, scheduling, and resource management to advanced aggregation techniques, congestion control, and layer-2 path selection algorithms.