Wireless operators, in developed or emerging regions, must support the triple-play service offerings demanded by the market or by regulatory bodies through so-called Universal Service Obligations (USOs). The same USO often also requires the coverage of a large percentage of the population, which especially in emerging regions lives in vast rural areas outside the larger cities. Since individual operators might have different requirements such as available spectrum licenses or technologies, we have developed a carrier-grade heterogeneous multi-radio back-haul architecture which may be deployed to extend, complement or even replace traditional operator equipment. This Wireless Back-Haul (WiBACK) architecture integrates broadcast technologies to off-load the distribution of live content, such as TV or radio, to longer range, e.g. DVB-T, overlay cells. Therefore, the WiBACK architecture provides a cost-effective low-power alternative to extend the wireless back-haul coverag e in urban, but especially in rural and previously unconnected areas. In order to manage the physical and logical resources of such a network, a centralized coordinator approach has been chosen, where no routing state is kept at plain WiBACK Nodes (WNs) which merely store QoS-aware MPLS forwarding state. In this paper we present our design of the centralized Topology Management Function (TMF) and its ring-based approach, validate its functionality and evaluate the performance for dense and sparse topologies
Wireless operators, in developed or emerging regions, must support triple-play service offerings as demanded by the market or mandated by regulatory bodies through so-called Universal Service Obligations (USOs). Since individual operators might face different constraints such as available spectrum licenses, technologies, cost structures or a low energy footprint, the EU FP7 CARrier grade wireless MEsh Network (CARMEN) project has developed a carrier-grade heterogeneous multi-radio back-haul architecture which may be deployed to extend, complement or even replace traditional operator equipment. To support offloading of live triple-play content to broadcast-optimized, e.g., DVB-T, overlay cells, this heterogeneous wireless back-haul architecture integrates unidirectional broadcast technologies. In order to manage the physical and logical resources of such a network, a centralized coordinator approach has been chosen, where no routing state is kept at plain WiBACK Nodes (WNs) which merely store QoS-aware MPLS forwarding state. In this paper we present our Unidirectional Technology (UDT)-aware design of the centralized Topology Management Function (TMF), which provides a framework for different topology and spectrum allocation optimization strategies and algorithms to be implemented. Following the validation of the design, we present evaluation results using a hybrid local/centralized topology optimizer showing that our TMF design supports the reliable forming of optimized topologies as well as the timely recovery from node failures
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