Indoor airport radio-over-fiber network traffic model and performance analysis using load-balancing techniques [Invited]

The development of airports such as the recently inaugurated Heathrow Terminal 5, as well as the increasing number of people using these facilities every day for business reasons or just for pleasure, reveals the importance of adequate and reliable communication facilities in this context. This environment is characterized by multiservice, multistandard wireless technologies and a highly variable traffic demand in space and time due to passenger flow, behavior, and usage from the terminal's entrance to the corresponding boarding gate, ruled by flight departure schedules, in the indoor environment. The Intelligent Airport (TINA) project establishes its objective as the creation of a seamless hybrid wireless and wired infrastructure capable of providing users with a wide range of services, based on radio-over-fiber (RoF) networks, anticipating the deployment of multiple air interfaces within 4G networks. In this paper the spatial and temporal traffic demand is analyzed and modeled through simulation, as a means of selecting the optimum location for the base stations/antenna units (BSs/AUs) in the network. A load-balancing technique is applied to ease the load on congested cells using strategically located fixed relay nodes, and the network's behavior is analyzed for different BS properties.