Holistic Design and Optimization for Scalable Wireless/Wired Hybrid Access Networks

Wireless/wired hybrid network offers a promising solution to future broadband access. Exploiting the potential of a hybrid network requires an integrated effort on network design and optimization. We discuss the inter-network traffic and intra-network traffic that commonly exist in an access network, and study to improve transmission efficiency for the two types of traffic. We propose a three-step holistic design and optimization: 1) optimizing the locations of gateway access points (GAP) to reduce wireless hops traffic needs to travel before reaching the wired part; 2) connecting GAPs by "shortcuts" to reduce wireless hops for intra-network traffic; and 3) routing with infrastructure awareness to optimize transmission. In particular, we propose a novel idea of "Virtual Channel" using only existing wired infrastructure to achieve inter-GAP connectivity. Simulation experiments show that a combination of these three steps jointly reduces transmission cost in hybrid networks, with a good scalability when network size grows.