Design of Backbone for Wireless Citywide Networks like Wireless Trondheim

Abstract

This master's thesis will investigate some of the technological solutions available for the construction of a backbone for a wireless citywide network (CWN), such as Wireless Trondheim, and a special attention is given to the possible advantages of using infrastructure already in place. There are several different technologies which can be used as a backbone for the wireless CWN, and in this thesis strengths and weaknesses of the various solutions will be discussed. Some requirements, such as scalability to handle increased capacity demand from future access technologies, may be more important to satisfy than others, and the discussion will see how this might rule out or favor some technology choices. In addition to demands from regular traffic to be carried in the network, also research traffic should be allowed. It is discussed how different requirements as a consequence of this research traffic will set limitations to which technology to use. While the performance of each of the technologies are relatively constant for all cases and easy to determine, the cost of using the different technologies is not. For this reason most effort is put into the analysis of this decision factor. Different possible scenarios are introduced, and the costs of using various technologies in the different scenarios are calculated. The results from the calculations are then discussed in more detail, and an important part of this discussion is sensitivity analysis. The values for several of the parameters used in the calculations will be changed, and the various analyses show how the change of one parameter will affect the result of the calculations. Based on the calculation results and the discussion of the results, some principles which can be used as guidelines in planning and deployment of a backbone for a wireless CWN will be suggested.