Performance of Multipath in Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) Access Network with Network Virtualization

Abstract

Nowadays, multipath routing algorithms and resource distribution strategies of the homogeneous network are the research focus of the Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) network which is the combination of optical subnetwork and wireless subnetwork. However few studies concerned on the efficient way to set up multipath in FiWi network as the affiliation of heterogeneous networks and packet reordering are tangled problems. Separating the Internet service provider (ISP) into two independent sections, nfrastructure provider (InP) and service provider (SP), the proposal of network virtualization provides a potential method to solve this problem. As a starting point, in this paper we apply network virtualization to remove the differences between heterogeneous networks to take FiWi network as a whole. Moreover, we propose a viable way to establish multipath access in the FiWi network through the flexible use of virtual networks (VNs) which can be deployed in the virtual resource manager (VRM). Besides, we present the superior performance of multipath in the FiWi network with network virtualization based on the simulation results by using the multipath scheduling policy Weighted Round Robin (WRR).