Low-Latency Oriented Network Planning for MEC-enabled WDM-PON based Fiber-Wireless Access Networks

WDM-PON-based mobile edge computing (MEC)-enabled fiber wireless access networks (MFWAN) have been identified as a promising technology for next-generation broadband access. Low-latency oriented network planning of the WDM-PON-based MFWAN would be required for low-latency access to newly emerging latency-sensitive applications in the fifth-generation (5G) era. However, this would require a low-latency oriented network design in the network planning phase and has thus become a crucial challenge. In this paper, we investigate low-latency oriented network planning of the WDM-PON-based MFWAN under physical and management constraints. To this end, we develop a mathematical model to minimize total transmission latency for all latency-sensitive services. Our model is composed of the propagation latency on the paths and the processing latency on the network equipment and is subject to constraints of maximal transmission distance, maximal PON power budget, bandwidth requests, and the fronthaul latency limit under some functional split options. Given the model's complexity, we also propose a heuristic algorithm called latency-minimized integrated multi-associated positioning and routing algorithm (LMI-MAPRA). The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the benchmark algorithm with more total transmission latency reductions in both sparse and dense networks. We also analyze the impact of key parameters on comparisons of different approaches in terms of low-latency optimal performances.