MC-FiWiBAN: An Emergency-Aware Mission-Critical Fiber-Wireless Broadband Access Network

The convergence of optical and wireless networks has been envisioned recently as an attractive economic broadband access solution; yet, its usage has been restricted to public users only. To serve mission-critical services in public safety and disaster relief communications using the fiber-wireless integration, key challenges such as fault recovery, security, and quality of service assurance must be addressed. This article introduces MC-FiWiBAN, a new emergency-aware architecture that leverages layer 2 virtual private networks to support mission-critical services over the integration. Each virtual private network corresponds to a specific mission-critical system requirements bundle that is stipulated in the service level agreement and fulfilled via an effective resource management paradigm. Simulation results show that MC-FiWiBAN can commit guaranteed quality of service for emergency and non-emergency services.