Development of Programmable Fiber-Wireless Educational Testbed

Abstract

Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) network is an integration of fiber optic and wireless connections in the same network. FiWi is needed due to rapid increment of Internet users and bandwidth-hungry services. Therefore, a lot of solutions have been proposed and created by researchers using embedded system-based hardware and off-the-shelves routers in order to study FiWi technology. However, off-the-shelves routers have a limitation on its ability to be reconfigurable and scalable to a certain extent. Hence, this thesis proposes the development and performance evaluation of a reprogrammable, fast configurable, scalable and flexible FiWi router testbed. The testbed is using embedded system-based hardware that can be used for lab-scale experiments for research and educational purposes. Raspberry Pi is used as the embedded system hardware to develop the router since it is reconfigurable, space friendly, cost-efficient and user friendly. Each router comprises of four Raspberry Pis; one Header Pi and three Forwarding Pis, which are connected via two Ethernet switches. For wireless router, an additional access point is used as the antennae of the router. The performance of the testbed in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, and jitter for upstream and downstream are done in wireless network, fiber network and FiWi network. The performance of the proposed testbed is scaled up with off-the-shelf router and industrial grade routers in terms of throughput for each network where the throughput shows similar increasing trend proving that the testbed is working correctly. The end-to-end delay of the testbed behaves expectedly as the data size increases and comply with IEEE 802.15.4 routing scheme trend. Whereas the jitter complies the Cisco’s standard which is under 30 ms. The maximum jitter in FiWi is 8.25 ms. A stress test on the testbed is conducted by sending two traffics of data simultaneously. The result shows that the end-to-end delay for two traffics is twice as much as single traffic as expected since router needs to process the data twice the amount of data. The maximum jitter of the proposed router for two traffics is 11.23 ms which is still under 30 ms. The scalability test is done for Wireless-Fiber-Wireless (Wi- FiWi) network and Fiber-Wireless-Fiber (Fi-WiFi) network. The results prove that the proposed testbed is suitable to be a reprogrammable, fast reconfigurable, scalable and flexible FiWi router testbed for research and educational purposes.