The proposed research focuses on the technology necessary to design, develop and deploy a “truly integrated” fixed-mobile access infrastructure combining wireline PON and 4G mobile broadband access technologies. In all current relevant works the two access technologies are operating independently as an overlay rather than an integrated architecture. In that case the overlay architecture essentially consists of the collocation (rather than true integration) of the two access networks. The proposed research is the first attempt to truly integrate optical and wireless access technologies, especially for the upcoming 4G LTE networks. The specific scientific and technological objectives of the project are as follows: (1) Develop a fully-distributed Ethernet-based converged multiservice networking architecture that enables the integration of next-generation fiber-based Passive Optical Network (PON) and Fourth-Generation (4G) mobile broadband access technologies, (2) Demonstrate and quantify the performance of a fully distributed multiservice packet-based converged fixed-mobile transport infrastructure, (3) Develop a unified control plane that manages and controls both fixed optical and mobile radio network resources for the hybrid access architecture. This calls for new integrated wireline and wireless radio control algorithms and procedures that operate in a distributed manner (including bandwidth allocation, handover control, radio resource management, admission control, etc.), (4) Develop time-efficient strategies for collaborative, distributed QoS-aware dynamic network resource allocation and packet scheduling schemes that are specifically tailored to a hybrid optical wireless access architecture, while at the same time conforming with the signaling and control standards of each access technology separately.
