(A) study on QoS behavior and mobility management in a converged optical-wireless access network

Abstract

The advent of Internet protocol television (IPTV), Internet gaming and similar bandwidth hungry new generation applications has continued to drive the need for higher bandwidth capacities and by extension the need for service providers to further over-provision network resources (especially in the absence of accurate traffic models). This leads to increased capital expenditure (CAPEX) and reduced RoI. The need for higher bandwidth capacities is most prevalent in the access network, which represents the part of the service provider’s network infrastructure that is closest to the customer. Unfortunately, this part of the service provider’s network has also remained the bottleneck in efforts to deliver bandwidth-intensive new-generation applications and services directly to customers. In the wired access network, GEPON is a promising technology for relieving this bottleneck while its counterpart in the wireless access network is WiMAX. Interestingly, these two promising technologies are quite similar and so synergistically converging them makes very good business sense for relieving the prevailing access network bottleneck issue. Consequently, we propose a converged quadruplet-service (video, voice, data and mobility) capable network that emerges from the convergence of GEPON and WiMAX and we address the technical challenges involved in such a convergence. Such a converged network takes full advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of each of the two promising technologies; a solution that is currently generating a lot of interest in both the academia and in the telecommunications industry. Meanwhile, in the telecommunications industry, service providers are now moving from a network-centric-based approach to a customer-centric-based approach in terms of service provisioning, which is in line with recognizing the customer as King. Providing customer-centric services involves providing services that meet the quality of service (QoS) expectations of applications ...