SMART-FIWI-HETNETS - SMART-FIWI-HETNETS

The research activities of the Smart-FiWi-HetNets projects are:

• Design of high-capacity low-latency NG-PON based mobile backhaul infrastructures with inter-ONU communications and multi-failure recovery capabilities. This task develops and investigates novel optical fiber backhaul infrastructures using evolutionary and/or disruptive unpowered NG-PON technologies to increase the capacity and reduce the energy consumption, complexity, and OPEX of LTE-A mobile backhaul networks. Low-latency connections between ONUs are designed to enable the cooperation among their collocated LTE-A BSs and WLAN APs and render the shared fiber backhaul adaptable to varying traffic loads and achieve fast bandwidth-efficient resilience against a single or multiple simultaneous fiber failures. The anticipated results of this task are as follows: 1) enable NG-PON fiber infrastructures for backhaul sharing among LTE-A BSs and WLAN APs, 2) render them dependable and adaptable for load balancing and self-healing in real-time, and 3) provide inter-ONU communications of very low latency for enhanced CoMP;
• Investigation of advanced traffic steering and real-time self-healing techniques for FiWi enhanced HetNets with WiFi offloading capability. The goal of this task is to develop and analyze the performance of advanced traffic steering techniques based on cell association, biasing, re-selection, and dual-mode UE-tracked BS/AP switching, and study the impact of different fiber backhaul topologies and configurations. The proposed traffic steering techniques will be combined with real-time fault compensation techniques to develop self-healing solutions for FiWi enhanced HetNets. Close attention will be paid to the investigation of adaptive WiFi offloading policies with multipath features based on fiber backhaul bandwidth availability. The anticipated results of this task are as follows: 1) exploit traffic steering in overlapping coverage areas of FiWi enhanced HetNets for enhanced end-to-end performance, 2) realize integrated FiWi-HetNet real-time fault compensation techniques, and 3) develop intelligent WiFi offloading strategies for unified LTE-A/WLAN
  networks;
• Development of energy- and traffic-aware contention resolution and coordination techniques for event-driven M2M communications in FiWi-HetNet based smart grid communications infrastructures. This task studies the challenges and opportunities of enhancing FiWi access networks with wireless and passive fiber optic sensors and analyzes the coexistence performance of event-driven M2M traffic and conventional human-to-human (H2H) traffic taking emerging low-power WiFi and Sub 1 GHz WLAN technologies into account. We develop a distributed priority-based random channel access scheme for renewable-energy aware wireless sensors, a traffic-aware cooperative access class barring scheme among BSs using the low-latency fiber backhaul and traffic steering techniques for M2M load balancing, and a hybrid optical-wireless MAC protocol for coordinating fiber optic and wireless sensors. The anticipated results of this task are as follows: 1) provide event-driven M2M congestion mitigation with reduced signaling overhead, 2) decrease M2M access delay via cooperative WLAN/LTE-A load balancing, and 3) enable wide area situational awareness (WASA) for fast fault recovery in smart power grids.