The increasing traffic demand from the use of 3G/4G, streaming, and other broadband wireless services exposes existing bottlenecks in the communications infrastructure and the coordination between the wireless network and its wired counterpart. While wireless systems are constantly evolving to newer generations and higher capacities, their supporting wired networks urgently require advancements in both architecture design and enabling technologies. New optical access systems specifically tailored for the unique natures of various wireless standards are investigated. This dissertation presents the design and experimental verification of high-capacity optical-wireless communication systems using advanced electrical and optical technologies. Technologies such as high level modulation and multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) to increase the spectral efficiency is approaching the Shannon limit. New frequency bands with larger bandwidth are to be explored; for example, millimetre wave (mm-wave) spectrum range (30-300 GHz), especially the license-free spectrum located in 60 GHz. Although fiber-optic systems excel in the high-bandwidth core network, as bandwidth demand increases, more and more progress has been made towards the usage of fiber in the last mile. Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) technology has been proposed as a cost-effective optical access solution to support high-speed wireless communications, especially at the mm-wave band. Signal processing and coordination are centralized at the central office (CO), making the system economical and simple to build, operate, and maintain. Moreover, RoF systems are capable of delivering radio signals with different frequencies and protocols simultaneously. Therefore, the advantage of integrated fiber wireless systems leads to the first research topic of this dissertation: multi-band multi-service RoF systems. With an emphasis on the uniformity of the RoF platform that accommodates both legacy wireless services and advanced mm-wave services, the first part of the dissertation presents two schemes - analog all-band RoF and band-mapped 60-GHz RoF - to cover distinct application scenarios. In the all-band RoF access architecture, lower RF signals, such as Wi-Fi and cellular signals, and 60-GHz signal are transmitted at their original carrier frequencies for both indoor and outdoor coverages. On the other hand, the band-mapped mm-wave RoF scheme, fully utilizing the wide 7-GHz bandwidth at 60 GHz, delivers multiple converged high-speed services only through 60-GHz wireless link, which is especially suited for in-building broadband wireless access. The experimental verification of an all-band RoF system featuring relaxed component requirement is introduced, followed by a real-time multi-service demonstration in the proposed band-mapped 60-GHz RoF system. This dissertation also presents the design, analysis, and experimental demonstration of next-generation high-capacity cellular networks to keep up with the ever-growing bandwidth demand and performance requirements. New mobile backhaul (MBH) architectures based on orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) are proposed along with a simple and low-latency clock distribution and recovery scheme. The transmission of OFDMA signals in the dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) network with flexible clock rates and DSP-free clock recovery is implemented. Also, a spectrally-efficient, low-complexity clock distribution and recovery scheme for OFDMA-based MBH in coherent ultra-dense WDM (UDWDM) system is demonstrated. Finally, mobile fronthaul (MFH) architectures based on subcarrier multiplexing (SCM) technology, which significantly reduces the requirements on both the number of wavelengths per cell site and the optical bandwidth of the optical transceivers, are systematically investigated. Additionally, two upstream schemes, tailored for the uplink (UL), are introduced to maintain low complexity, and more importantly, to achieve high spectral efficiency by wavelength sharing. Therefore, Internet-access-oriented optical-wireless systems using Wi-Fi and other emerging mm-wave technologies are developed along with the optical fronthaul and backhaul for cellular networks in this dissertation. Moreover, with the proposed techniques, heterogeneous networks can be seamlessly provided even with different services, radio nodes, and performance requirements.

“Connected society” where everything and everyone are connected at any time and on any location brings new challenges for the network operators. This leads to the need of upgrading the transport networks as the segment of Internet infrastructure connecting the fixed users and mobile base stations to the core/aggregation in order to provide high sustainable bandwidth, as well as supporting a massive number of connected devices. To do this, operators need to change the way that access networks are currently deployed. The future access network technologies will need to support very high capacity and very long distances, which are the inherited characteristics of optical transmission. Hence, optical fiber technology is recognized as the only future proof technology for broadband access. Capacity upgrade in the access networks can lead to a huge capacity demand in the backbone network. One promising solution to address this problem, is to keep the local traffic close to the end users as much as possible, and prevent unnecessary propagation of this type of traffic through the backbone. In this way, operators would be able to expand their access network without the significant capacity upgrade in the higher aggregation layers. Motivated by this need, a comprehensive evaluation of optical access networks is carried out in this thesis regarding ability of accommodating local traffic and amount of possible saving in the backbone by implementing locality awareness schemes. Meanwhile, next generation optical access (NGOA) networks have to provide high capacity at low cost while fulfilling the increasing reliability requirements of future services and customers. Therefore, finding cost-efficient and reliable alternative for future broadband access is one of the most important contributions of this thesis. We analyzed the tradeoff between the cost needed to deploy backup resources and the reliability performance improvement obtained by the proposed protection mechanism. Among different NGOA architectures, hybrid time and wavelength division multiplexing passive optical network (TWDM PON) is considered as a proper candidate providing high capacity and large coverage. Therefore, this approach is further analyzed and several tailored protection schemes with high flexibility are proposed to statisfy different requirements from the residential and business users in the same PON.  The work carried out in the thesis has proved that TWDM PON can also offer high reliability performance while keeping the network expenditures at an acceptable level. Considering some other advantages such as low power consumption and high flexibility in resource allocation of this architecture, it has high potential to be the best candidate for NGOA networks.  Moreover, new deployments of radio access networks supporting the increasing capacity demand of mobile users lead to the upgrade of the backhaul segment as a part of broadband access infrastructure. Hence, this thesis also contributes with a comprehensive techno-economic evaluation methodology for mobile backhaul. Several technologies are investigated in order to find the most cost-efficient solution for backhauling the high capacity mobile networks.  Finally, a PON-based mobile backhaul with high capacity and low latency has been proposed for handling coordinated multipoint transmission systems in order to achieve high quality of experience for mobile users. / <p>QC 20150320</p>

Mobile data traffic is expected to increase substantially in the coming years, with data rates 1000 times higher by 2020, having media and content as the main drivers together with a plethora of new end-user services that will challenge existing networks. Concepts and visions associated with the ICT evolution like the network society, 50 billion connected devices, Industrial Internet, Tactile Internet, etc., exemplifies the range of new services that the networks will have to handle. These new services impose extreme requirement to the network like high capacity, low latency, reliability, security, seamless connectivity, etc. In order to face these challenges, the whole end-to-end network has to evolve and adapt, pushing for advances in different areas, such as transport, cloud, core, and radio access networks. This work investigates the impact of envisioned 2020 society scenarios on transport links for mobile backhaul, emphasizing the need for an integrated and flexible/adaptive network as the way to meet the 2020 networks demands. The evolution of heterogeneous networks and ultra-dense network deployments shall also comprise the introduction of adaptive network features, such as dynamic network resource allocation, automatic integration of access nodes, etc. In order to achieve such self-management features in mobile networks, new mechanisms have to be investigated for an integrated backhaul management. First, this thesis performs a feasibility study on the mobile backhaul dimensioning for 2020 5G wireless ultra-dense networks scenarios, aiming to analyze the gap in capacity demand between 4G and 5G networks. Secondly, the concept of an integrated backhaul management is analyzed as a combination of node attachment procedures, in the context of moving networks. In addition, the dynamic network resource allocation concept, based on DWDM-centric transport architecture, was explored for 5G scenarios assuming traffic variation both in time and between different geographical areas. Finally, a short view on techno-economics and network deployments in the 2020 time frame is provided.

By 2020 there will be 50 billion connected devices over the Internet. With the fast-increasing data traffic demand in both fixed and mobile networks, network operators need to migrate networks towards next generation solutions. The network migration requires the enormous investment in equipment and infrastructure, while the revenues are not expected to grow significantly. Therefore, one of the main challenges for network operators is to find out a proper cost-effective optical network solution that can match future high capacity demand and flexibly support multiple network services on a common network infrastructure. The first part of the thesis addresses the Active Optical Network (AON) and its migration strategies towards Next Generation Optical Access (NGOA) solutions. Several migration strategies are proposed from the perspective of network topology, data plane and control plane. A general methodology for Techno-Economic analysis has been developed and applied to the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculation of different NGOA solutions. The thesis provides a complete cost evaluation of AON migration paths, which can be used by network operators to assess the economic feasibility of network migration. A converged Optical Transport Network (OTN) that can serve both fixed and mobile network services is beneficial from the cost-saving perspective. However, the different types of services, require different network performance. The second part of the thesis focuses on the investigation of the converged OTN that can be flexibly and timely adjusted to satisfy varying service conditions. A programmable OTN featured with Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) in the data plane and Software Defined Networking (SDN) in control plane has been proposed. To demonstrate the benefits of the converged OTN, the thesis also provides a multi-domain orchestration architecture for the multiple network services.  The resource orchestration, across three network domains: OTN, mobile network and cloud, enables agile service creation and optimized resource allocation among the multiple domains. / <p>QC 20170512</p>