Enhanced signaling scheme with admission control in the hybrid optical wireless (HOW) networks

The hybrid optical wireless (HOW) network has been viewed as a promising solution to meet the increasing user bandwidth and mobility demands. Due to the basic differences in the optical and wireless technologies, a challenging problem lies in the Media Access Control (MAC) protocol design so that it can support stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. In this paper, we describe and evaluate a resource management framework designed for the HOW networks. There are two parts in the resource management framework The first part is the Enhanced MPCP (E-MPCP) scheme aiming at improving signaling ability between the optical and wireless networks. The second part is an Integrated Optical Wireless Admission Control (IOW-AC) scheme aiming at providing the integrated bandwidth allocation in the HOW networks. Our results show that the performances of the system in terms of throughput, delay and packet dropping probability depend on several factors. These factors include the frame duration, the traffic load and the total number of shared users. The results also highlight that our proposed system achieves significant improvements over the traditional approach in terms of user QoS guarantee and network resource utilization.