Real-time optical-wireless cooperative switching on wireless quality degradation for end-to-end video delay guarantee

Abstract

This paper proposes an optical-wireless cooperative control method to guarantee end-to-end delays in the case of radio quality degradation in wireless networks by switching optical paths. The method leverages the control information from mobile systems to dynamically switch the optical path between the distributed unit (DU) and the far aggregated central unit (CU) to another path forward to the nearest virtualized central unit (vCU) at the edge sight, on the basis of the radio quality. This enables demanding applications that require a combination of high bandwidth and low latency, such as remote operation using drones. Preliminary simulations were conducted to investigate the effect of quality degradation in the wireless domain and the potential effectiveness of the proposed delay compensation method. In the experiments conducted to verify the feasibility of the proposed method, the results demonstrated that the optical path switching was successfully performed without packet loss and within 4 ms from the transmission of the control frame. The proposed method was also able to correctly switch back when the processing rate of mobile edge computing (MEC) was exceeded after the radio quality recovered. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of further coordination between wired and wireless control for a wider range of real-time applications using video.