Integration of unidirectional technologies into wireless back-haul architecture
Mathias Kretschmer · Brunel University Research Archive (BURA) (Brunel University London) · 2012
Back-haul infrastructures of today's wireless operators must support the triple-play services demanded by the market or regulatory bodies.To cope with increasing capacity demand, the EU FP7 project CARMEN has developed a cost-effective heterogeneous multi-radio wireless back-haul architecture, which may also leverage the native multicast capabilities of broadcast technologies such as DVB-T to off-load high-bandwidth broadcast content delivery.However, the integration of such unidirectional technologies into a packetswitched architecture requires careful considerations.The contribution of this thesis is the investigation, design and evaluation of protocols and mechanisms facilitating the integration of such unidirectional technologies into the wireless back-haul architecture so that they can be configured and utilized by the spectrum and capacity optimization modules.This integration mainly concerns the control plane and, in particular, the aspects related to resource and capability descriptions, neighborhood, link and Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) Label-Switched Path (LSP) monitoring, unicast and multicast LSP signalling as well as topology forming and maintenance.During the course of this study we have analyzed the problem space, proposed solutions to the resulting research questions and evaluated our approach.Our results show that the now Unidirectional Technology (UDT)-aware architecture can readily consider Unidirectional Technologies (UDTs) to distribute, for example, broadcast content. AcknowledgementsAlthough the efforts that led to this PhD thesis were driven and for a large part performed by the author, such a multi-year endeavor would hardly be possible without support from friends, colleagues or partners.I would like to thank Karl Jonas for eventually getting me started and supporting my efforts along my regular duties.Jens Moedeker deserves a big 'Thanks' for all the valuable discussions during the course of this thesis and especially for reviewing this document and the numerous hints and tips to improve it.I also like to thank Christian Niephaus for his input, the fruitful discussions as well as the contributions to many of our publications.Also 'Thank You' to Thorsten Horstmann and Philipp Batroff for their input, critical questions and for actually getting our demonstrator off the ground.A big thanks to my friends and family whom I got to meet less frequently during this process.And, a special Thank You goes to Chia-Yen for her understanding, support and valuable input.Last, but not least, I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Gheorghita