Modified backoff technique with transmission priority scheme in fiber-wireless networks

The convergence of optical and wireless technologies hold great promise for the development of future broadband access networks. As such, we work on the idea of integrating the gigabits passive optical network (GPON) with wireless local area network (WLAN) to realize fiber-wireless networks. We focused on techniques to improve the end user WLAN performance by utilizing the interoperability of these two networks. In this paper, the fairness between the uplink and the downlink transmission for the IEEE 802.11a WLAN in the fiber-wireless networks is investigated. A simple fairness index is introduced as the comparison metric. Our proposed scheme showed promising results as it maintains an almost unity fairness index irrespective of the traffic load. This performance is achieved by reducing the constant contention window size of the access point to one fourth of its original size. The approach gives a higher transmission priority to the access point considering the fact it carried more load than its associate wireless users.