Traffic-prediction-assisted dynamic bandwidth assignment for hybrid optical wireless networks

Hybrid optical-wireless networks provide the inexpensive broadband bandwidth, vital for modern applications, as well as mobility, and scalability required for an access network. However, in order to provide satisfactory Quality of Service (QoS) on such a non-homogeneous network, innovative designs are required. This paper proposes a novel scheduling mechanism to significantly improve the delay guarantee, while maintaining high-level throughput, by predicting the incoming traffic to optical network units (ONU). The proposed scheduler managed to exploit the available information in hybrid optical-wireless networks, to enhance the ONU scheduler. This results in accurate prediction of incoming traffic, which leads to intelligent and traffic-aware, scheduling and dynamic bandwidth assignment (DBA). Based on the proposed architecture, two DBA algorithms are proposed and their performance is evaluated by extensive simulations. Moreover, the maximum throughput of such network is analyzed. The results show that by using the proposed algorithms, the delay bound of delay-sensitive traffic classes can be decreased by a factor of two, without any adverse effect on the throughput.