Streamlining network operations of a gram panchayat, Indore India: A traffic offloading approach with tunicate swarm optimization algorithm

Abstract

In this digital era, access networks play a very crucial role in connecting users across diverse geographical regions, each with its challenges. Thus, during the deployment of access networks, utilizing network resources effectively and planning meticulously are essential to ensuring minimal waste and optimal infrastructure utilization. In the context of a fiber wireless (FiWi) access network, the proposed work examines various network parameters. Within FiWi network architecture, each network component has its own function to do, and among them optical network unit (ONU) is crucial to the network. It plays a very important role, as it works as a bridge between fiber and wireless access networks. Since the traffic handling resources of the ONU are limited, thus while transferring traffic, there are chances of bottleneck near ONUs. This may result in increased network delay along with inefficient resource utilization of ONUs, as some might get overloaded and some might be underloaded. Thus, the paper addresses the issue of overloaded ONUs by proposing a solution involving traffic offloading to underloaded ONUs via wireless connections. Offloading ensures effective resource utilization (RU) and improves the packet delivery ratio (PDR), along with lesser blocking probability (BP), but may suffer from increased network traffic delay. Hence, to address this issue, the proposed method uses the tunicate swarm algorithm (TSA) to reduce traffic offloading delay and the total traffic delay experienced by the traffic in the network. Redistributing traffic optimizes network resources, resulting in an enhanced user experience and cost-effective scalability in the face of rising wireless connectivity demands in various geographical regions. Thus, the proposed approach which relies on optimization for offloading is compared with before offloading and after offloading (without optimization) shows improvement in network performance parameters. Traffic offloading delay and total traffic delay lowers by approx. 25 % in comparison to without TSA optimization. RU and PDR improves by approx. 6 % and BP shows 25 % reduction in comparison to without traffic offloading. A practical scenario for a gram panchayat (GP) is also considered to check the effectiveness of the proposed work.