Dynamic Optical Resource Allocation in Transport Networks Based on Mobile Traffic Patterns

Abstract: Mobile traffic increases rapidly. Based on Ericsson’s forecast [1], mobile traffic is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate on percentage of 45% as the number of smartphone subscriptions and the consumption per subscriber increase. The monthly data traffic volume is expected to grow 6 times between 2015 and 2021. As demand increases, new technologies are investigated and deployed to cover the user requirements. Intense effort is given by researchers for the arrival of fifth generation (5G) network. High performance and increased capacity requirements drive research to heterogeneous networks. With the term “heterogeneous network”, a network that consists of different technologies and architectures is described. A heterogeneous wireless network involves the combination of macro and micro cells to improve coverage and capacity. All the traffic generated from the mobile network should be transferred from the antenna, through an access network, to the main office and from there to the backbone network. Optical networks are considered as the ideal solution for this purpose and research drives technology towards the usage of optical networks in the Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) architectures. The FMC architectures are proposed architectures [2] that focus to converge the fixed, mobile access and aggregation networks into a single transport network. In this study, we analyze the FMC architecture. We particularly analyze the Fronthaul architecture in combination with transport technologies such as Next Generation – Passive Optical Network 2 (NG-PON2) and Wavelength Routed Wavelength Division Multiplexing PON (WR-WDM-PON). We also take under consideration traffic patterns of mobile networks generated in various urban areas in the city of Stockholm, based in different use of land. Based on the traffic pattern, the number of small cells needed per area is calculated. In this thesis project, the traffic patterns from the mobile network and the transport network architectures are studied. The purpose of this thesis is to create an algorithm and study different sharing scenarios of the underlying transport infrastructure. The results of this algorithm will reveal if sharing and reusing resources in the transport infrastructure is beneficial in terms of saving resources.