Link allocation, routing, and scheduling for fading hybrid FSO/RF networks

Hybrid free space optical (FSO)/RF networks have recently been proposed as an improved architecture for wireless mesh networks (WMN), providing broadband communications. In this paper we study the throughput improvement achieved by augmenting an RF WMN suffering from channel fading with an FSO network. We address the problem of optimally allocating FSO links and routing traffic through the hybrid network. The results show that the throughput of the original RF network increases dramatically using our algorithm.