MPCP Assisted Power Control and Performance of Cell Breathing in Integrated EPON-WiMAX Network

In this paper, we propose cell breathing as a load balancing mechanism into WiMAX network with an integrated EPON backbone. Cell breathing is a well known cellular telephony concept that handles congestion by changing the coverage area of a fully loaded cell tower. In WiMAX, cell breathing can be achieved by changing the transmitting powers of the base stations. In the integrated EPON-WiMAX system, access gateways, i.e. EPON integrated base stations, report their residual downlink queue sizes to the central office using modified multi-point control protocol. Centralized gateway selection and power allocation can be made jointly in the central office for all connected access gateways. An iterative algorithm is proposed that equalizes the expected transmission time based on the reported queue sizes and adjusted transmission power level. The performance of the proposed cell breathing in integrated EPON-WiMAX system is simulated. The results show that cell breathing significantly outperforms fixed power scheme.