Abstract
The deluge of date rate in today's networks imposes a cost burden on the backhaul network design. Developing cost-efficient backhaul solutions becomes an exciting, yet challenging, problem. Traditional technologies for backhaul networks, including either radio-frequency (RF) backhauls or optical fibers (OF). While RF is a cost-effective solution as compared with OF, it supports the lower data rate requirements. Another promising backhaul solution is the free-space optics (FSO) as it offers both a high data rate and a relatively low cost. The FSO, however, is sensitive to nature conditions, e.g., rain, fog, and line-of-sight. This paper combines both the RF and FSO advantages and proposes a hybrid RF/FSO backhaul solution. It considers the problem of minimizing the cost of the backhaul network by choosing either OF or hybrid RF/FSO backhaul links between the base stations, so as to satisfy data rate, connectivity, and reliability constraints. It shows that under a specified realistic assumption about the cost of OF and hybrid RF/FSO links, the problem is equivalent to a maximum weight clique problem, which can be solved with moderate complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed solution shows a close-to-optimal performance, especially for reasonable prices of the hybrid RF/FSO links. They further reveal that the hybrid RF/FSO is a cost-efficient solution and a good candidate for upgrading the existing backhaul networks. © 2016 IEEE.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 2563-2577 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | IEEE Transactions on Communications |
| Volume | 64 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 22 2016 |
Bibliographical note
KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2020-10-01Acknowledged KAUST grant number(s): EE002355
Acknowledgements: A part of this paper [1] is published in proc. of IEEE International Conference on Communication Workshops (ICC' 15), London, U.K., June 2015. Hayssam Dahrouj would like to thank Effat University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for funding the research reported in this paper through the Research and Consultancy Institute. This work is supported by KAUST project no. EE002355 at the Research Institute, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals. The associate editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it for publication was C. Assi.