Evaluating user-perceived performance in high-speed backhaul networks

In this paper, we evaluate the performance perceived by end-users with very high access rates, connected to a common backhaul link that aggregates the traffic of multiple access areas. We model, at flow level, the way a finite population of users with heterogeneous access rates and traffic demands shares the capacity of this common backhaul link. We then evaluate several practically interesting use cases, focusing particularly on the performance of users subscribing to recent FTTH offers in which the user access rates may be of the same order of magnitude as the backhaul link capacity. We show that, despite such high access rates, reasonable performance can be achieved as long as the total offered traffic is well below the backhaul link capacity. The obtained performance results are used to derive simple dimensioning guidelines for backhaul networks.