Modified backoff technique in fiber-wireless networks

A rapid development of broadband telecommunication services has strongly motivated the necessity of upgrading the access network infrastructure. As of now, network traffic load remains a bottleneck in efforts to deliver video, voice as well as advanced internet applications to residential customers due to the limitation of available bandwidth. By integrating gigabits passive optical network (GPON) with wireless local area network (WLAN) it is expected to meet the bandwidth demand by end users. However, interference from the wireless access still limits the end users´ performance. Hence, this work aims to enhance the WLAN performance in the proposed fiber-wireless networks by utilizing the interoperability of these two networks. In this paper, we modify the legacy binary exponential backoff (BEB) algorithm in WLAN by introducing a constant contention window (CW) size. The optimized CW size is determined by analyzing the total traffic load passing through the GPON network. In comparison to the existing techniques, our scheme shows up to 50% improvement in throughput performance and nearly 5× reduction of media access delay when the scheme is heavily loaded.