A Joint Routing and Channel Assignment Scheme for Hybrid Wireless-Optical Broadband-Access Networks

In this paper, we investigate mechanisms for improving the quality of communications in wirelessoptical broadband access networks (WOBAN), which present a promising solution to meet the growing needs for capacity of access networks. This is achieved by using multiple gateways and multi-channel operation along with a routing protocol that effectively reduces the effect of radio interference. We present a joint route and channel assignment scheme with the objective of maximizing the end-to-end probability of success and minimizing the end-to-end delay for all active upstream traffic in the WOBAN. Performance evaluations of the proposed scheme are presented using ns-2 simulations, which show that the proposed scheme improves the network throughput up to 3 times and reduces the traffic delay by 6 times in presence of 12 channels and 4 network interface cards (NICs), compared to a single channel scenario.