Wireless mesh and optical burst switching convergence for a novel metropolitan area network architecture

Wireless mesh networks (WMN) have attracted increasing attention from the research community as a high-performance and low-cost solution to last-mile broadband Internet access. In the other side, optical burst switching (OBS) is a promising metropolitan solution [1] that uses optical fiber with burst switching paradigm. In this paper, we propose a novel Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) architecture, called Optical Burst Wireless Mesh Architecture (OBWMA) which integrates WMN at the user access side and OBS at the core of the MAN. OBWMA aims to combine advantages of both WMNs and OBS networks, such as large coverage at low cost and bandwidth availability. We specify the details of the interconnection and the internetworking of WMNs and the OBS network in OBWMA. Moreover, we develop an analytical model to compute the end-to-end delay in OBWMA in order to support flow requests with delay constraints. Furthermore, we propose: (1) a bandwidth provisioning scheme for the WMN part (WBP); (2) a bandwidth provisioning scheme for the OBS part (WPBP); (3) an adaptive burst assembly scheme (AHBA) at the border between WMN and OBS; and (4) a control bridge (CB) that ensures Quality of Service (QoS) mapping at the border between the WMN and OBS. Simulation results using ns-2 demonstrate the feasibility of OBWMA, the accuracy of the proposed analytical model and the effectiveness of WBP, WPBP and AHBA to provide QoS provisioning for the converged network.