There has been a significant increase in data traffic in both optical fiber and mobile networks. It poses numerous challenges for cost-efficient network planning in terms of cost, scalability and availability, especially in access networks. Passive Optical Networks (PONs), as access network solution, offers high bandwidth, but as point-to-multipoint architecture, it is vulnerable to failures. To support higher service availability, ITU-T has proposed various protection strategies, and their economic impacts have been previously investigated. The introduction of protection architectures can incur hefty costs for network operators if not planned judiciously. In this paper, a potential solution with fixed optical (PON) and fixed mobile convergence (FMC) has been investigated for a holistic resilient infrastructure, together with sustainable utilization of existing resources. Four architectures with PON and Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) based MBS-fronthaul integration are proposed to evaluate two current ITU-T and four proposed protection architectures with respect to infrastructure costs, resilience, and technical feasibility using Heuristic method for planning. The analysis is carried out using real municipal areas aiming to contribute to deployment of efficient, resilient and future-proof access networks. Even simplest converged architecture, with Unprotected PON + Unprotected Mobile Base Station (MBS) offers availability of four 9s over the Unprotected PON’s three 9s, and requires 1 Cost Unit (CU) of additional expense for protected ONUs.     «

There has been a significant increase in data traffic in both optical fiber and mobile networks. It poses numerous challenges for cost-efficient network planning in terms of cost, scalability and availability, especially in access networks. Passive Optical Networks (PONs), as access network solution, offers high bandwidth, but as point-to-multipoint architecture, it is vulnerable to failures. To support higher service availability, ITU-T has proposed various protection strategies, and their econ...     »