Broadband NG-PON Networks and Their Designing Using the HPON Network Configurator

With the emerging applications and needs of ever increasing bandwidth, it is anticipated that the Next-Generation Passive Optical Network (NG-PON) with much higher bandwidth is a natural path forward to satisfy these demands and for network operators to develop valuable access networks. NG-PON systems present optical access infrastructures to support various applications of many service providers. Therefore, some general requirements for NG-PON networks are characterized and specified. Hybrid Passive Optical Networks (HPON) present a necessary phase of the future transition between PON classes with TDM or WDM multiplexing techniques utilized on the optical transmission medium – the optical fiber. Therefore, some specific requirements for HPON networks are characterized and presented. For developing hybrid passive optical networks, there exist various architectures and directions. They are also specified with emphasis on their basic characteristics and distinctions. Finally, the HPON network configurator as the interactive software tool is introduced in this chapter. Its main aim is helping users, professional workers, network operators and system analysts to design, configure, analyze, and compare various variations of possible hybrid passive optical networks. Some of the executed analysis is presented in detail.

Data Processing and Exchange Challenges in Video-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

This chapter presents the main challenges in developing complex systems built around the core concept of Video-Based Wireless Sensor Networks. It summarizes some innovative solutions proposed in scientific literature on this field. Besides discussion on various issues related to such systems, the authors focus on two crucial aspects: video data processing and data exchange. A special attention is paid to localization algorithms in case of random deployment of nodes having no specific localization hardware installed. Solutions for data exchange are presented by highlighting the data compression and communication efficiency in terms of energy saving. In the end, some open research topics related with Video-Based Wireless Sensor Networks are identified and explained.

Towards Smarter Cities and Roads

This chapter highlights the importance of Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) in the context of smarter cities and roads, a topic that currently attracts significant academic, industrial, and governmental planning, research, and development efforts. In order for VANETs to become reality, a very promising avenue is to bring together multiple wireless technologies in the architectural design. Clustering can be employed in designing such a VANET architecture that successfully uses different technologies. Moreover, as clustering addresses some of VANETs' major challenges, such as scalability and stability, it seems clustering will have an important role in the desired vehicular connectivity in the cities and roads of the future. This chapter presents a comprehensive survey of clustering schemes in the VANET research area, covering aspects that have never been addressed before in a structured manner. The survey presented in this chapter provides a general classification of the clustering algorithms, presents some of the most advanced and latest algorithms in VANETs, and in addition, constitutes the only work in the literature to the best of authors' knowledge that also reviews the performance assessment of clustering algorithms.

Economical Aspects of Heterogeneous Networks

The high usage of multimedia content in daily activities has put strains on the network operators as the transmitted content can lead to network congestion. In an effort to control and reduce the traffic, network operators have capped their billing plans. A capped billing plan may require the user to pay extra money when exceeding the quota, and this can result in undesirably high bills for the mobile users. A solution that has been shown to reduce the size of transmitted data and also addresses user needs in terms of billing cost was presented in Molnar and Muntean (2013a). This solution involves personalising the multimedia content based on the user attitude towards risk. It makes use of a model that assesses the user attitude towards risk by considering the user age, gender, and risk attitude self-assessment. The research presented in this chapter adds to the state of the art by presenting an improvement to the user risk attitude model (Molnar & Muntean, 2012) that takes into account the user context (e.g. whether the user uses the roaming service or not, the current data consumption) as well as the user input. The improved model may be used to provide a more accurate trade-off: quality vs. price (Molnar & Muntean, 2013a) and this leads to an increase in user satisfaction and better service quality.

Indoor Short Range Wireless Broadband Communications Based on Optical Fiber Distribution

There is a continuous demand for increasing wireless access broadband services to the end users, especially with widespread high quality mobile devices. The Internet mobile applications and multimedia services are constantly hungry for broadband wireless bandwidth. In order to overcome this bandwidth limitation, a frequency band (57-64 GHz) has recently been assigned for short range indoor wireless broadband signals due to the large available bandwidth. However, the transmission at this band is limited to a few meters due to the high atmospheric absorption loss. Radio over Fiber (RoF) technology was considered an efficient solution to extend the distribution range and wireless capacity services. This chapter presents an introduction to RoF technology and its basic required optical components for indoor short range wireless millimeter waves (mm-waves). The limiting factors of RoF and its impairments are also described. Moreover, optical mm-wave generation solutions are explained and followed by the recent optical 60GHz activities and upcoming research areas such as THz and optical wireless.

TraffCon

Traffic congestion is a major issue in the modern society, and unfortunately, it continues to worsen as the number of cars on the road grows behind the ability of existing road infrastructures to cope. Additionally, vehicle fuel consumption and gas emissions are increasing, and concentrated efforts to propose solutions to reduce these and consequently the pollution are needed. In this context, this chapter presents TraffCon, an innovative vehicle route management solution, which makes use of a novel best route selection algorithm for vehicular traffic routing and of vehicular wireless communications to reduce not only journey times but also fuel consumption and as a direct consequence vehicle gas emissions. The chapter shows how TraffCon can be supported by an IEEE 802.11p sparse roadside-vehicle network with very good results in comparison with classic approaches.

Game Theory for Collaboration in Future Networks

Cooperative strategies have the great potential of improving network performance and spectrum utilization in future networking environments. This new paradigm in terms of network management, however, requires a novel design and analysis framework targeting a highly flexible networking solution with a distributed architecture. Game Theory is very suitable for this task, since it is a comprehensive mathematical tool for modeling the highly complex interactions among distributed and intelligent decision makers. In this way, the more convenient management policies for the diverse players (e.g. content providers, cloud providers, home providers, brokers, network providers or users) should be found to optimize the performance of the overall network infrastructure. The authors discuss in this chapter several Game Theory models/concepts that are highly relevant for enabling collaboration among the diverse players, using different ways to incentivize it, namely through pricing or reputation. In addition, the authors highlight several related open problems, such as the lack of proper models for dynamic and incomplete information games in this area.

Resource Allocation in Heterogeneous Broadband Wireless Access Networks

The advent of heterogeneous Broadband Wireless Access Networks (BWANs) has been to support the ever increasing cellular networks' data requirements by increasing capacity, spectrum efficiency, and network coverage. The focus of this chapter is to discuss the implementation details (i.e. architecture and network components), issues associated with heterogeneous BWANs (i.e. handovers, network selection, and base station placement), and also the various resource allocation schemes (i.e. shared resource allocation in split handover and inter-RAT self-organizing networks) that can improve the performance of the system by maximizing the capacity of users.

Interference Mitigation and Energy Management in Heterogeneous Networks

In Long Term Evolution (LTE) 4G systems, coexistence of multiple in-band smallcells defines what is called heterogeneous cellular networks. There is no doubt that the development of heterogeneous networks and the popularization of intelligent terminals facilitate subscribers with great convenience, better Quality of Experience (QoE) guarantee, and much higher traffic rate. However, interference management will be indispensable in heterogeneous networks. Meanwhile, with emerging various energy-hungry services of subscribers, energy-aware design attracts a wide attention. Motivated by interference mitigation and energy-saving challenges of the heterogeneous networks and the promising cognitive radio techniques, more advanced energy-saving and interference control techniques based on cognitive radio should be developed for better QoE. In this chapter, the authors first review cognitive radios, multiple types of smallcells, and introduce the benefits of cognitive radio-enabled heterogeneous networks. Then, focusing on the scheme design of cognitive interference management and energy management, finally, simulation results are provided to show the improved performance of these proposed cognitive schemes.

Simulation of Competition in NGNs with a Game Theory Model

Like in a real competitive market situation, Next Generation Networks (NGN) competitors need to adapt their strategy to face/react the strategies from other players. To better understand the effects of interaction between different players, the authors build a Game Theory model in which the profit of each operator will be dependent not only on their actions but also on the actions of the other operators in the market. This chapter analyzes the impact of the price (retail and wholesale) variations on several output results: players' profit, consumer surplus, welfare, costs, and service adoption. The authors assume that two competing FTTH networks (incumbent operator and new entrant) are deployed in two different areas. They also propose in this chapter an adoption model use in a way that reflects the competition between players and that the variation of the services prices of one player has an influence on the market share of all players. Finally, the model uses the Nash equilibrium to find the best strategies.