Transport Solutions for Future Broadband Access Networks

Abstract: “Connected society” where everything and everyone are connected at any time and on any location brings new challenges for the network operators. This leads to the need of upgrading the transport networks as the segment of Internet infrastructure connecting the fixed users and mobile base stations to the core/aggregation in order to provide high sustainable bandwidth, as well as supporting a massive number of connected devices. To do this, operators need to change the way that access networks are currently deployed. The future access network technologies will need to support very high capacity and very long distances, which are the inherited characteristics of optical transmission. Hence, optical fiber technology is recognized as the only future proof technology for broadband access.Capacity upgrade in the access networks can lead to a huge capacity demand in the backbone network. One promising solution to address this problem, is to keep the local traffic close to the end users as much as possible, and prevent unnecessary propagation of this type of traffic through the backbone. In this way, operators would be able to expand their access network without the significant capacity upgrade in the higher aggregation layers. Motivated by this need, a comprehensive evaluation of optical access networks is carried out in this thesis regarding ability of accommodating local traffic and amount of possible saving in the backbone by implementing locality awareness schemes.Meanwhile, next generation optical access (NGOA) networks have to provide high capacity at low cost while fulfilling the increasing reliability requirements of future services and customers. Therefore, finding cost-efficient and reliable alternative for future broadband access is one of the most important contributions of this thesis. We analyzed the tradeoff between the cost needed to deploy backup resources and the reliability performance improvement obtained by the proposed protection mechanism.Among different NGOA architectures, hybrid time and wavelength division multiplexing passive optical network (TWDM PON) is considered as a proper candidate providing high capacity and large coverage. Therefore, this approach is further analyzed and several tailored protection schemes with high flexibility are proposed to statisfy different requirements from the residential and business users in the same PON.  The work carried out in the thesis has proved that TWDM PON can also offer high reliability performance while keeping the network expenditures at an acceptable level. Considering some other advantages such as low power consumption and high flexibility in resource allocation of this architecture, it has high potential to be the best candidate for NGOA networks. Moreover, new deployments of radio access networks supporting the increasing capacity demand of mobile users lead to the upgrade of the backhaul segment as a part of broadband access infrastructure. Hence, this thesis also contributes with a comprehensive techno-economic evaluation methodology for mobile backhaul. Several technologies are investigated in order to find the most cost-efficient solution for backhauling the high capacity mobile networks.  Finally, a PON-based mobile backhaul with high capacity and low latency has been proposed for handling coordinated multipoint transmission systems in order to achieve high quality of experience for mobile users.