ONU placement in FiWi network using enhanced backtracking search algorithm

Fiber-wireless (FiWi) access network is an integration of wireless and fiber networks. FiWi network is popular due to its mobility, flexibility, robustness, and high bandwidth. A challenging issue in the FiWi network is to determine the optimal position of optical network units (ONUs) to decrease system cost and increase system stability, throughput and performance. In recent years, some optimization meta-heuristics for ONU placement were proposed and achieved promising results. However, the performance of existing methods is not ideal. This paper presents an enhanced backtracking search algorithm (EBSA) for the ONU placement. The goal is to minimize the overall distance between wireless users and ONUs. The experimental results on the ONU placement scenarios show that the proposed EBSA algorithm outperformed the standard BSA, HHO, and CLS-LFD algorithms.