A Hybrid Fiber-Femtocell Indoor Network to Support Low-Latency and High-Bandwidth Indoor Communication Applications

Indoor networks carry most mobile user activities and industrial communication practices. Beyond 5G (B5G), ultra-responsive and high-capacity indoor networks will be increasingly demanded by sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare, edutainment and many others. The need of indoor networks of low latency and high capacity drives passive optical networks, a traditional wide-area access technology, to synergize with wireless networks inside premises. The feasible network architecture and management strategies are in open exploration. In this study, we investigate a hybrid fiber-femtocell indoor network architecture and propose a flexible temporal and spatial bandwidth sharing (FTSS) scheme in supporting the low latency and high capacity required by B5G applications. In specific, we exploit short-range inter-connections among room optical network units integrated with femtocells (ONU-FBSs) to achieve efficient indoor network traffic delivery. The FTSS facilitates direct local traffic exchange among ONU-FBSs and collaborative uplink traffic delivery by the ONU-FBSs not needing central coordination. In this way, the latency and capacity performance of the network are improved. With modeling analysis and simulations, we evaluate the performance of the hybrid network with FTSS to carry indoor traffic in comparison with existing solutions.