Fiber-wireless (FiWi) access networks smartly integrate the mobility, robustness, and ubiquity of wireless networks
and the high capacity of fiber networks. A demanding task in FiWi networks is to find the optimal
placement of optical network units (ONUs), which leads to resource, throughput, and cost optimization. Several
studies have been carried out to solve the ONU placement problem. Most approaches achieve encouraging results;
however, they suffer from trapping in local optima, and their performance is far from the ideal state. This
paper introduces a chaotic local search-based levy flight distribution (CLS-LFD) algorithm to optimize the position
of ONUs in the FiWi network. The proposed algorithm models the ONU placement as a constraint multimodal
optimization problem. The objective is to minimize the overall average distance between ONUs and users.
With a test on four ONU placement benchmarks, the proposed CLS-LFD algorithm has shown significant
improvement over the canonical LFD algorithm and several counterpart algorithms in terms of convergence
performance and cost value.