Cost Effective Broadband Access Network Using Wi-Fi over Passive Optical Network

Abstract

Demand for broadband network is rapidly increasing the volume of data traffic from users. To meet this demand and provide customers with cost effective solutions, service providers concentrate mostly on the access network. Competition among the service providers leads to different broadband access technologies to serve customers with the best solution. Custom-ers’ demands for real time applications, as well as downloading of video and other applica-tions require high bandwidth allocation with high data rate. Also Governments put a sub-stantial influence in providing the cost effective solution to the different geographical loca-tion of country. As a result, service providers concentrate on minimizing the deployment cost for access equipment while maximizing the revenue from the service offerings. In this paper, we have proposed broadband access technology using Wi-Fi over Passive Optical Net-work(PON)to provide a cost effective solution considering geographical as well as economi-cal conditions. Introducing smart antennas such as narrow-beamwidth and switched array antennas can substantially improve the coverage distance for Wi-Fi access. For areas where the distance among houses is large, we propose to deploy Wi-Fi access instead of laying fi-bers. The optimization model to determine the number of Wi-Fi access points and to minimize the total cost of the network has been tuned to performance improvement.