QoS-Aware Radio-and-Fiber (R&F) Access-Metro Networks

Future bimodal fiber-wireless (FiWi) access-metro networks may deploy both radio-over-fiber (RoF) and radio-and-fiber (R&F) technologies. RoF networks are rapidly becoming mature, but they fall short of interworking with distributed wireless MAC protocols such as DCF in widely deployed IEEE 802.11 WLANs. While R&F networks are able to avoid this limitation by means of protocol translation at the optical-wireless interface, recent testbed activities demonstrated that their multimedia QoS performance is far from acceptable, giving rise to various open R&F networking issues. In this paper, we report on our ongoing research activities on providing improved QoS support in R&F access-metro networks by means of (i) hierarchical scheduling and hybrid access control in integrated RPR/WiMAX metro networks, and (ii) hierarchical frame aggregation in integrated EPON/next-generation WLAN-based mesh access networks.