Cloud-Integrated WOBAN: An offloading-enabled architecture for service-oriented access networks

In a hybrid wireless-optical broadband access network (WOBAN), to access any service, connection requests require multi-hop communications over the wireless mesh network (WMN) and the Passive Optical Network (PON), and subsequently over the Internet to some server in the service provider’s domain. This may cause bottlenecks in the WMN and may result in degraded performance. Today’s access networks are increasingly shaped by the services that they provide to the end users. In this paper, we propose an access network design that integrates a cloud with WOBAN called Cloud-Integrated WOBAN (CIW). CIW creates an infrastructure platform to provide different “cloud services” from within the access network. It has several important benefits: (1) it improves resource utilization by offloading traffic from wireless links, (2) it provides higher scalability by reducing bottleneck from the gateways of WOBAN, and (3) it creates an infrastructure for providers to facilitate different cloud services with their access network. We determine how the cloud components providing the services should be placed in WOBAN in order to optimize the resources while providing better service. We formulate this problem as a Mixed-Integer Linear Program (MILP) and solve it on a realistic study case. We also propose a novel energy-saving routing mechanism, called Green Routing for CIW (GRC), that allows CIW to self-manage the activation of network components, namely ONUs and CCs, to minimize the overall energy consumption of CIW. GRC performs load-balanced anycast routing across active devices. Our performance evaluation shows that GRC achieves significant energy savings with low average packet delay.