End-to-end delay heuristics for adaptive optical wireless networks

Wireless communications offer an attractive option for many military, commercial as well as personal communication needs because of flexibility, cost effectiveness, and mobility. The quality features of wireless communications have led to tremendous growth in the development of novel technologies that raise the need for broadband wireless communications. Optical wireless systems offer high transmission rates that can accommodate these broadband needs. Optical wireless links can be prone to the atmosphere, which can result in a performance degradation. Therefore, optical wireless networks should be adaptive with flexible links. In this paper we emphasize the adaptability of optical wireless networks and propose new heuristics for the optimization of communication delay in a flexible link regime for networks with unbounded degree transceivers. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed heuristics and validate the improvement in network functionality as compared to the unadaptable environment. Empirical results show that a 50% reduction in average packet delay, as compared to unadaptable networks, can be achieved by a network based on the proposed heuristics.