Hybrid Wireless-Optical Broadband Access Network (WOBAN): Capacity Enhancement for Wireless Access

Noting that the optical part of a hybrid wireless- optical broadband access network (WOBAN) has high capacity, we need to enhance the capacity for wireless access using a low-cost solution. Our prior work developed a solution where each wireless node was equipped with a single radio. Deploying multiple radios, say two, at each node will improve the performance of wireless access, but this will also increase the cost of the solution. However, deploying multiple radios at only a few nodes, especially those that are overloaded with traffic, can lead to a less-costly solution, possibly without sacrificing performance. Hence, we study how to optimally place a limited number of additional radios at the wireless nodes to save the overall network cost. We formulate this problem as an Integer Linear Program (ILP) and solve it using a standard solver such as CPLEX. As expected, by deploying multiple radios at bottleneck wireless nodes, we can obtain almost the same performance as a WOBAN with multi-radios at all nodes.