An effective resource allocation medium access control protocol for radio-over-fiber access networks based on wavelength reuse

Users’ rapidly increasing demands for bandwidth and mobility in conjunction with the surge of delay-sensitive applications, creates the necessity for further research and development of new energy- and cost-effective technologies such as radio-over-fiber (RoF) and radio-and-fiber (R&F). The research community is dealing with medium access control (MAC) protocol design for RoF networks, so that it can support bandwidth-demanding multimedia services such as voice over IP, video on demand, video conferencing, etc. In this work, a novel MAC protocol for RoF access networks is proposed, which is based on a modification of the multipoint control protocol (MPCP). The network's decision centre receives detailed feedback from the mobile client queues via MPCP's GATE/REPORT mechanism so as to efficiently allocate the bandwidth and the wavelength resources in a dynamic manner. The novelty of this protocol is that since wavelength reuse is achieved a single wavelength can be used by more than one remote antenna unit (RAU). The proposed MAC protocol also adapts its operation according to the clients’ actual traffic demands and manages to exploit the huge capacity that the optical medium provides. Furthermore, a best-fit algorithm is applied in order to achieve further optimization. Simulation results reveal the superior performance and the better scalability of the proposed protocol compared with similar proposals reported in the literature.