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Towards Seamless Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) Access Networks: Convergence and Challenges

Sonia Assa and Martin Maier Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique INRS-EMT University of Quebec Montreal, QC, Canada Email: {aissa, maier}@emt.inrs.ca ABSTRACT Traditionally, wireless and optical fiber networks have been designed separately from each other. Wireless networks aimed at meeting specific service requirements while coping with particular transmission impairments and optimizing the utilization of the system resources to ensure cost-effectiveness and satisfaction for the end user. In optical networks, on the other hand, research efforts rather focused on cost reduction, simplicity, and future-proofness against legacy and emerging services and applications by means of optical transparency. With the ultimate goal of providing access to information when needed, wherever needed, and in whatever format it is needed, the vision of technological convergence of wireless and optical networks is not only becoming a necessity but also plays a key role in future communications networks. Towards the technical evolution of wireless-optical access networks and the seamless coexistence of both technologies, this paper provides a review of state-of-the-art developments and advances in wireless and optical communications, presents key technical challenges for providing seamless communications in fiber-wireless (FiWi) access networks, and highlights important research issues for providing intelligence, transport, access, and convergence of these future networks. 1. INTRODUCTION Todays modern society has benefited from the advances in information and communication technology (ICT) in different ways. Organizations and individuals rely on various communications means to execute different tasks of our daily life, run businesses, access and deliver information, get entertainment, and provide public safety, just to name a few. Thanks to the advances in wireless and optical communications, we live in an ICT world where new expressive and interactive opportunities are better adapted to our needs, objects and physical environments generate new forms of interaction, and the media are getting richer. To achieve future goals in the communications industry, advanced broadband access technologies need to offer a mix of traditional services such as voice, data, and video, as well as new and emerging applications, e.g., triple play, video on demand, P2P audio/video file sharing and streaming, multichannel HDTV, mobile TV, telemedicine, multimedia/multiparty on-line gaming, and telecommuting. Indeed, there is a growing desire for being connected to any device, anytime, and anywhere, which is causing an increasing demand for gaining access to the radio spectrum. However, the spectrum resources being limited, to enable bandwidth-hungry services and applications, future broadband access networks need to combine optical and wireless access technologies in an effective way so as to benefit from their strengths, avoid their shortcomings, and deliver the best of both worlds to the mobile users. In this context, this paper presents a vision towards the evolution of wireless-optical access networks. Specifically, following a brief review of stateof-the-art developments in wireless and optical communications, the need for the convergence of both domains is emphasized, and several technical challenges involved are presented for the so-called future fiber-wireless (FiWi) access networks. 2. WIRELESS ACCESS NETWORKS 2.1 In a Plethora of Wireless Technologies While the wireless world is embracing different high-speed communications systems with different radio access technologies (RAT) and complementary capabilities, such as 3G cellular, WPANs, and WLANs, research is forging ahead to future communications systems and networking architectures capable of providing ubiquitous packet-based connectivity for a plethora of applications and services, with low-cost and low-power computing devices and high security, e.g., triple play, video on demand, P2P audio/video file sharing and streaming, multichannel HDTV, multimedia/multiparty on-line gaming, and telecommuting. Currently, many RATs are available through different systems such as cellular (GSM, UMTS, HSPA...), broadcast (DVB-T), WLAN (Hiperlan/2, IEEE 802.11), and WPAN (Bluetooth). Initially, each of these systems was designed for specific services in target operating environments. To accommodate the rapidly growing demand for multimedia services and extend the Internet success to mobile Internet, future broadband wireless

978-1-4244-1639-4/07/$25.00 2007 IEEE

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networks are expected to provide data rates up to 100 Mb/s with wide-area coverage and up to 1Gb/s with localarea coverage, and to be flexible enough to accommodate a wide range of transmission rates and different degrees of traffic burstiness. Indeed, wireless Internet-based multimedia applications and devices will have very different QoS requirements and processing capabilities, respectively. However, since wireless communications systems are resource limited, it is important that the network be efficiently managed so as to maximize its resource utilization while maintaining the QoS required by various users and traffic types; objectives that raise significant challenges in providing feasible and effective deployment and operation of these networks. The success of future wireless networks heavily relies on their ability to provide high network throughput while satisfying the users QoS requirements in practical operating conditions and network topologies. This poses significant technical challenges given the adverse effects of the wireless propagation environment, the increasing demands for bursty traffic, the variability in terms of services and applications, and the scarce radio resources. Moreover, emerging applications impose greater resource-sharing and dynamism demands. Under such stringent constraints, providing end-to-end QoS requires sophisticated communications techniques and networking protocols that ensure the resource sharing is efficiently controlled and precisely predictable, so as to provide applications with adequate resources to meet their QoS requirements while guaranteeing high system performance in terms of throughput, fairness and revenue. In this context, the terminal, user, application and network, constitute relevant participants that need to be part of the decision-making process. Indeed, mobile users will have access to a variety of mobile devices with a wide range of display sizes and capabilities, and expect services which will not only depend on traditional single traffic type, but also multiple traffic types which can even be supported by simultaneous connections from different types of networks, such as cellular and ad-hoc. The co-existence of heterogeneous networks raises further questions on how to manage the traffic in an efficient way. From the system management point of view, a restricted PHY layer processing cannot meet the co-existence of multiple RATs. Tightly coupled networks and simultaneous connections supported by reconfigurable terminals will offer a flexible service environment with improved QoS to the end users. Future programmable networks and reconfigurable terminals will provide network flexibility and scalability as well as efficient traffic management, with convergence towards IP-based networking with ubiquitous and seamless access among 2G, 3G, local access systems, augmented by ad-hoc networks and short-range communications. 2.2 Notable Enabling Technologies So far, there has been significant research targeting performance enhancements at different layers of the network protocol stack using, for instance, multiple antennas, adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) and interference cancellation at the PHY layer, opportunistic scheduling, aggressive multiple access at the MAC layer, and energy-constrained routing at the network layer. The inflexibility of the strict layering architecture has also prompted a new design approach for wireless networks, namely cross-layer design that supports adaptability and optimization across multiple layers of the protocol stack. Cross-layer techniques have already shown various optimization opportunities by co-designing different layers [1-3]. These include channel-dependent scheduling, combined AMC and ARQ, explicit loss notification TCP, adaptive resource allocation, joint scheduling and interference cancellation, and application adaptation. Notable among these advanced enabling technologies is the use of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna configurations. Indeed, ever since the pioneering works by Foschini et al. [4] and Telatar [5], revealing the benefits of employing multiple antennas to enhance the performance of wireless networks, research pertaining to MIMO technology has been thriving, not least due to the prospected increase in capacity, or the ability to mitigate the effects of deep fading that characterizes the wireless environment. Thereafter, numerous approaches have been proposed to take advantage of the new degrees of freedom induced by employing multiple antennas, and benefit from the MIMO diversity and spatial multiplexing gains [2], [6], [7]. Implementing these techniques in future networks is certainly necessary but also introduces new networking problems and issues that need to be addressed in order to ensure full exploitation of the PHY gain in multi-user multi-service environments [2]. Another concept which promises significant performance enhancements is cooperation. In cooperative communications, silent nodes that would have been idle in a conventional network try to help other active nodes in order to increase the bandwidth efficiency and the transmission reliability. In its simplest form, cooperation may consist of silent nodes simply relaying the information of active transmitters [8]. In more involved cases, several nodes may cooperate to create a virtual MIMO system [9] or a beamforming network [7]. In the coexisting context of different types of networks belonging to affiliated network operators (NO), the concept of cooperation can also be extended to systems with different RATs. The resources of the involved networks can be simultaneously shared to ensure wider coverage, instant access, and uninterrupted communications, for instance, through relaying and mesh networking. In particular, the cellular phone may act as an intermediate node for communicating with a remote user or server via HSPA or with local appliance via Bluetooth, and wireless access points can participate in a mesh network to ensure nearly ubiquitous wireless

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coverage in large urban areas. Cooperation can also take the form of traffic sharing, dynamically migrating users and traffics in a transparent way to networks and technologies that can maintain QoS and reliability requirements. This is of major importance not only for heterogeneous wireless networks but also for hybrid networks, namely, wireless-optical networks. 3. OPTICAL ACCESS NETWORKS Optical fiber provides an unprecedented bandwidth potential that is far in excess of the wireless and any other known transmission medium. A single strand of fiber offers a total bandwidth of 25000 GHz. To put this potential into perspective, it is worthwhile noting that the total bandwidth of radio on the planet Earth is not more than 25 GHz [10]. More importantly, optical networks lend themselves well to offloading electronic equipments by means of optical bypassing as well as reducing their complexity, footprint, and power consumption significantly while providing optical transparency to modulation format, bit rate, and protocol. According to [11], fiber to the home (FTTH) or close to it (FTTX) is poised to become the next major success story for optical fiber communications in terms of commercial adoption leading to revenue generation. Future FTTX access networks not only have to unleash the economic potential and societal benefit by opening up the first/last mile bandwidth bottleneck between bandwidth-hungry end users and high-speed backbone networks, but they also must enable the support of a wide range of new and emerging services and applications. Due their longevity, low attenuation, and huge bandwidth, passive optical networks (PONs) are widely deployed to realize FTTX access networks. Typically, these PONs are time division multiplexing (TDM) single-channel systems, where the fiber infrastructure carries a single upstream wavelength channel (from subscribers to central office) and a single downstream wavelength channel (from central office to subscribers). IEEE 802.3ah Ethernet PON (EPON) with a symmetric line rate of 1.25 Gb/s and ITU-T G.984 Gigabit PON (GPON) with an upstream line rate of 1.244 Gb/s and a downstream line rate of 2.488 Gb/s represent the current state-of-the-art of commercially available and widely deployed TDM PON access networks, but standardization efforts have already been initiated in the IEEE 802.3av task force to specify 10 Gb/s EPON. GPON offers strong operation, administration, maintenance, and provisioning (OAMP) capabilities and provides security at the protocol level for downstream traffic by means of encryption using the advanced encryption standard (AES). Furthermore, GPON efficiently supports traffic mixes consisting not only of ATM cells but also TDM (voice) and variablesize packets by using the GPON encapsulation method (GEM). EPON aims at converging the low-cost equipment and simplicity of Ethernet and the low-cost infrastructure of PONs. Security and OAMP are not specified in the EPON standard IEEE 802.3ah, but may be implemented using the data over cable service interface specification (DOCSIS) OAMP service layer on top of the MAC and PHY layers of EPON. Given the fact that 95% of LANs use Ethernet in conjunction with Ethernets low cost and simplicity, EPON is expected to become increasingly the norm [12]. Both GPON and EPON are commonly perceived to carry a single wavelength channel in each direction. The majority of real-world PON deployments, however, use an additional downstream wavelength channel for video distribution according to the wavelength allocation specified in the ITU-T G.983.3 recommendation which specifies a so-called enhancement band from 1539 nm to 1565 nm plus L-band reserved for future use. The enhancement band and L-band can be used to enable additional services such as overlay of multiple PONs on a single fiber infrastructure or optical time domain reflectometry (OTDR) for testing and troubleshooting. Adding the wavelength dimension to conventional TDM PONs leads to wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) PONs which have several advantages. Among others, the wavelength dimension may be exploited to (i) increase the network capacity, (ii) improve the network scalability by accommodating more end users, (iii) separate services, or (iv) separate service providers [12]. An interesting approach to increase split ratio, i.e., number of subscribers, and range is the so-called SuperPON. The latter is an architectural concept to realize long-reach PONs which is currently receiving considerable attention by network operators in an attempt to optically bypass central offices and consolidate metro and access networks, resulting in major cost savings and simplified network operation [13]. Long-reach PONs can be interesting for new entrant operators who wish to connect only the major geographically distributed business clients. Most of the reported studies on advanced PON architectures considered stand-alone PON access networks, with a particular focus on the design of dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) algorithms for QoS support and QoS protection by means of admission control [14]. Research on the (optically) opaque and transparent interconnection of multiple WDM PONs has begun recently, e.g., Stanford University access network (SUCCESS) [15] and STARGATE [16]. 4. FIBER-WIRELESS ACCESS NETWORKS The ultimate goal of the Internet and communication networks in general is to provide access to information when we need it, where we need it, and in whatever format we need it. To achieve this goal, wireless and optical

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technologies play a key role. Wireless and optical access networks can be thought of as complementary. Indeed, optical fiber does not go everywhere, but where it does go, it provides a huge amount of available bandwidth. Wireless access networks, on the other hand, potentially go almost everywhere, but provide a highly bandwidthconstrained transmission channel susceptible to a variety of impairments. Clearly, as providers need to satisfy users with continuously-increasing bandwidth demands, future broadband access networks must leverage on both technologies and converge them seamlessly, giving rise to fiber-wireless (FiWi) access networks. 4.1 Convergence In the last decade, wireless communications and optical communications have experienced rapid growth and commercial success. Albeit separate, these great successes in both areas have started fueling the vision of ubiquitous broadband multimedia communications. Building on advances in network infrastructure, low-power integrated circuits, and powerful processing algorithms, the convergence of wireless and optical communications is now underway, paving the way towards widespread acceptance of FiWi access networks in the next decade. FiWi access integrates the high capacity of optical with the flexibility of wireless to enable high-speed communications to mobile users in a transparent and seamless manner. FiWi can be implemented using different architectures. Notable among these, are architectures where optical technologies are used as backhaul network for wireless access points. In particular, architectures which use wireless mesh networks over optical fibers are very attractive, owing to their ease of installation and cost-effectiveness, which allow for wide coverage as well as rapid deployments to support unanticipated needs. Such architecture can yield numerous advantages, such as reduced complexity and flexible resource allocation. Indeed, functions such as modulation/demodulation, up/down-converting, and data multiplexing, can be performed at a central office serving several wireless access points, which in turn reduces operational costs, increases flexibility, and facilitates network scalability. Furthermore, radio resources can be allocated dynamically to wireless sites where they are mostly needed, thus making better usage of the available radio resources, and simplifying mobility handling. Achieving convergence requires the development and evaluation of new architectures and communications techniques that establish the benefits of both technologies while avoiding their shortcomings. In this vein, challenges are involved in all planes, form the network design, planning and dimensioning, to components and business models. 4.2 Challenges To integrate the two worlds, important challenges, at the fundamental and technological levels, will be at the forefront of research in FiWi access networks for many years to come. Central to such research endeavor is achieving end-to-end performance, providing flexibility, scalability and resilience, and reducing implementation complexity and costs. First, it will be crucial to have mechanisms in place to control system load, which will translate into higher capacity, greater mobility, instant access to information and ubiquitous computing. However, because of the physical characteristics of the different RATs of wireless systems and the variability of users requirements, the data rate of ongoing wireless connections will also vary, complicating the resource management/sharing in FiWi access networks. This raises technical issues such the required protocol interfaces between the resource management entities of these tightly coupled networks, and calls for the design of very flexible and effective protocols to allow enhanced routing and link adaptation that make the best usage of the available resources while dynamically accommodating the users traffic properties and QoS requirements. Resource management issues in FiWi networks are wide and deep. Indeed, it is not only essential to develop techniques for QoS control, mobility handling, and load balancing, but also transmission strategies that facilitate P2P communication for user-created content. In addition, establishing policies on how to use and reconfigure the available resources when multiple service providers delivering different types of services can share the same optical fiber is required. In this context, secure data management, synchronization and private exchange of user profile and context information are of particular importance. New techniques for connection setup and admission control are also needed. Call admission at the wireless side needs to be in harmony with the optical network activity. Routers can set up a connection, but the question on how they can do so without having to reconverge every time needs deep investigation. Open questions also arise in Radio-over-fiber (RoF) for flexible architectures. For instance, how to use RoF for the millimeter-wave (MMW) band and higher spectra, especially for indoor broadband communications, remains an open question. For efficient radio access, extensive research is required in the PHY layer domain. Indeed, due to the atmospheric absorption, the propagation loss at of high frequency bands, such as the MMV band, is quite high, which limits the free-space transmission distance of carriers at acceptable radiation power. In this context, investigating the impact of new frequency bands on the radio propagation is essential for the development of coding techniques suitable for high bit-rate wireless links. Furthermore, synchronization being an issue at high frequencies, extremely tight synchronization over the optical backhaul will be required.

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Low-cost effective techniques for electrical/optical conversion are required to realize operational FiWi systems. Efficient technologies for converting the RF or IF signals into optical signals, and also efficient and economically feasible modulation formats to convert optical signals into wireless will be needed. Challenges also concern the antenna design. In particular, designs that avoid interference with other wireless systems in the environment, especially for indoor broadband communications, are needed. Integration of optical and wireless also necessitates the development of network technologies and architectures that allow affordable availability of broadband FiWi access. Network management, new protocols, inter-domain routing and traffic engineering for end-to-end delivery of traditional and new added-value services, with QoS, resilience, and security, are needed. In addition, FiWi networks need to be adaptive so as to cope with traffic variations and new traffic patterns. Sophisticated load balancing and reconfiguration techniques to provide adaptive backhaul and shift the fiber capacity from one node to the other as traffic changes, are essential. Clearly, an in-depth study of reconfigurable optical network units (ONUs) is needed to shed some light on the performance-cost tradeoffs of reconfigurable optical access networks. Traffic modelling in this context is of major importance, and calls for the development of models reflecting empirical traffic evolution to converge high capacity fiber networks with lower capacity wireless networks. Network planning also induces new challenges. Questions remain on how to build networks that can support unknown traffic patterns, and how to seamlessly bridge optical backhaul with various wireless RATs. Transducers for the different wireless standards will need to be not only efficient but also cost-effective. In FiWi networks, services will vary in terms of QoS and bandwidth requirements. Accordingly, there is a need to investigate the impact and requirements of real-time applications (e.g., IPTV, mobile TV) on FiWi architecture, and to develop techniques for end-to-end resource allocation. Herein, a question arises on how intelligent the optical network needs to be. Intelligence is certainly required but the optical network needs to be less sensitive to technology changes (e.g., tighter spectrum), and functional for 10 Gb/s to100 Gb/s and beyond without having to change the infrastructure. Another interesting research avenue is the design of integrated failure recovery techniques that allow rerouting traffic via wireless networks in the event of one or more fiber cuts in the optical access networks. Indeed, given the fact that todays optical access networks typically have a tree topology; a single link failure in the optical feeder fiber would bring the entire optical access network down, unless traffic is rerouted wirelessly. At the business plane, FiWi access networks bring new issues as well. For instance, new business models allowing an efficient and economically beneficial sharing of the fiber capacity between different NOs are needed. In addition, new billing techniques will be required, as it is not straightforward to integrate the users utilization of the fiber and wireless portions of the network into a single bill. Finally, it is important to mention the need for advanced components that are also cost-effective so that to provide for an economically affordable operation and maintenance of FiWi networks. 5. CONCLUSION The main issue in FiWi access networks is how to integrate the wireless and optical technologies. Research in FiWi is now underway. Down the road, the boundary between both worlds will be softer, and as the commercial volume increases, the cost of components will be driven down, thus increasing the widespread and success for feasible and economically affordable deployment and operation of future FiWi access networks REFERENCES [1] G. Aniba, S. Assa, Adaptive Scheduling for MIMO wireless networks: Cross-layer approach and application to HSDPA, IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 259-268, Jan. 2007. [2] Q. Liu, S. Zhou, G. B. Giannakis, Cross-layer combining of adaptive modulation and coding with truncated ARQ over wireless links, IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. 3, no. 5, pp. 1746-1755, Sep. 2004. [3] S. Assa, A. Maaref, P. Mermelstein, Uplink packet scheduling in the presence of interference cancellation in multi-rate wireless CDMA networks", Wiley J. Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, SI on Radio Resource Management for Wireless Internet, vol. 3, no. 7, pp. 861-878, Nov. 2003. [4] G. J. Foschini, M. J. Gans, On limits of wireless communications in a fading environment when using multiple antennas, Kluwer J. Wireless Personal Communications, vol. 6, pp. 311-335, 1998. [5] E. Telatar, Capacity of multi-antenna Gaussian channels, European Trans. Telecommun. (ETT), vol. 10, no. 6, pp. 585-595, Nov./Dec. 1999. [6] A. Pascual-Iserte, A. I. Prez-Neira, M. A. Lagunas, On power allocation strategies for maximum signal to noise and interference ratio in an OFDM-MIMO system, IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 808-820, May 2004.

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T. Yoo, A. Goldsmith, On the optimality of multi-antenna broadcast scheduling using zero-forcing beamforming, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 528-541, Mar. 2006. V. Srinivasan, P. Nuggehalli, C.F. Chiasserini, R. Rao, Cooperation in wireless ad hoc networks, in Proc. IEEE INFOCOM03, San Francisco, CA, Mar.-April 2003. P. Mitran, H. Ochiai, V. Tarokh, Space-time diversity enhancement using collaborative communications, IEEE Trans. Information Theory, pp. 2041-2057, June 2005. P. E. Green, Optical networking update, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications., vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 764779, June 1996. R. Ramaswami, Optical networking technologies: What worked and what didnt, IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 44, no. 9, pp. 132239, Sep. 2006. T. Koonen, Fiber to the home/Fiber to the premises: what, where, and when, Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 94, no. 5, pp. 911-934, May 2006. D. P. Shea, J. E. Mitchell, Long-reach optical access technologies, IEEE Network, vol. 21, no. 5, pp. 5-11, Sept./Oct. 2007. C. Assi, M. Maier, A. Shami, Toward quality of service protection in Ethernet passive optical networks: challenges and solutions, IEEE Network, vol. 21, no. 5, pp. 12-19, Sept./Oct. 2007. F. An, D. Gutierrez, K. S. Kim, J. W. Lee, L. G. Kazovsky, SUCCESS-HPON: A next-generation optical access architecture for smooth migration from TDM-PON to WDM-PON, IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 43, no. 11, pp. S40-S47, Nov. 2005. M. Maier, M. Herzog, M. Reisslein, STARGATE: The next evolutionary step toward unleashing the potential of WDM EPONs, IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 45, no. 5, pp. 50-56, May 2007.

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