Hybrid Radio/Free-Space Optical Design for Next Generation Backhaul Systems
Abstract
The deluge of date rate in today's networks imposes a cost burden on the backhaul network design. Developing costefficient backhaul solutions becomes an exciting, yet challenging, problem. Traditional technologies for backhaul networks include either radio-frequency backhauls (RF) or optical fibers (OF). While RF is a cost-effective solution as compared to OF, it supports lower data rate requirements. Another promising backhaul solution is the free-space optics (FSO) as it offers both a high data rate and a relatively low cost. FSO, however, is sensitive to nature conditions, e.g., rain, fog, line-of-sight. This paper combines both RF and FSO advantages and proposes a hybrid RF/FSO backhaul solution. It considers the problem of minimizing the cost of the backhaul network by choosing either OF or hybrid RF/FSO backhaul links between the basestations (BS) so as to satisfy data rate, connectivity, and reliability constraints. It shows that under a specified realistic assumption about the cost of OF and hybrid RF/FSO links, the problem is equivalent to a maximum weight clique problem, which can be solved with moderate complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed solution shows a close-to-optimal performance, especially for reasonable prices of the hybrid RF/FSO links. They further reveal that the hybrid RF/FSO is a cost-efficient solution and a good candidate for upgrading existing backhaul networks.
Additional Information
© 2015 IEEE. Manuscript received October 30, 2015; revised March 4, 2016; accepted April 14, 2016. Date of publication April 22, 2016; date of current version June 14, 2016. This work is supported by KAUST project no. EE002355 at the Research Institute, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals. A part of this paper [1] is published in proc. of IEEE International Conference on Communication Workshops (ICC' 15), London, U.K., June 2015. Hayssam Dahrouj would like to thank Effat University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for funding the research reported in this paper through the Research and Consultancy Institute. The associate editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it for publication was C. Assi.Attached Files
Submitted - 1502.00137v2.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 66517
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20160427-151048210
- Effat University
- EE002355
- King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)
- Created
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2016-05-02Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field