Cost Effective Hybrid FSO-Wireless Architecture for Broadband Access Network

Free space optics (FSO) is known to be a viable alternative to optical fiber in fiber-wireless (FiWi) architecture. FSO has benefits such as high bandwidth, cost-efficiency, ease of deployment, flexibility, and an unlicensed spectrum. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid FSO-wireless (FoWi) architecture that integrates wireless-fidelity (Wi-Fi) enabled front-end with FSO based back-end for an active optical network (AON) to provide seamless connection to the last-mile users. In addition, we analyze signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) distribution, average data rate, deployment cost, and fairness of the proposed hybrid architecture. The proposed architecture is compared with conventional FiWi architecture in the presence of weak, moderate, and high atmospheric turbulence. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid FoWi architecture achieves a significantly lower deployment cost as compared to conventional FiWi architecture albeit with some trade-off in the performance specifically for weak atmospheric turbulence. In addition, this paper provides fairness analysis of the proposed architecture vis-a-vis conventional FiWi architecture.