Formulation of path selection by means of maximum flow and minimum delay on a Free Space Optical topology

Abstract

Wireless radio-frequency (RF) technologies has had universal wide-scale deployment. Despite this, the practical limitations of the RF spectrum being unable to meet the challenges (e.g. lack of security, high interference, limited bandwidth, scalability) of RF based communication networks have become increasingly apparent over the past decade. With the ever-growing of data heavy wireless communications, especially on the last mile (e.g. wireless mesh network) and the backbone, methods are required to help addresses the problem RF have been facing for the next generation network. Faced with such daunting obstacles in RF-only networks, the use of Free Space Optical (FSO) for wireless communications was proposed. FSO is a promising solution to security, limited spectrum bandwidth, the scalability problem of wireless mesh networks, but also the advantage of large transmission distance, free license, interference immunity, and high-bandwidth. Despite the major advantages of FSO technology, its widespread use has been hampered by atmospheric turbulence-induced fading. However, FSO is still consider to be a practical solution to RF challenges. To maximize the potential of FSO networks, we study the problem of maximum path resource flow for a route and minimum linear delay while the FSO topology under atmospheric turbulence. Such methods can be easy adopted to SDN to manage the data flow at the link-or network-layer.