Integrated FSO/PON for Broadband Access Networks: A Comprehensive Protocol Stack Design and Analysis

In integrated free-space optical/passive optical networks (FSO/PON), providing efficient media access control (MAC) protocol and ensuring high reliable transmission are two major challenging issues. This paper comprehensively addresses these issues through a protocol stack design, which jointly considers the dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA), adaptive rate (AR) transmission, and automatic repeat request (ARQ) with different retransmission strategies. A 2-D Markov chain model is developed to qualify quality-of-service (QoS) performance metrics in terms of frame loss probability, throughput and delay. Selected numerical results show that the proposed protocol stack design can offer considerable performance improvement over conventional ones.