  The deluge of date rate in today's networks imposes a cost burden on the
backhaul network design. Developing cost efficient backhaul solutions becomes
an exciting, yet challenging, problem. Traditional technologies for backhaul
networks include either radio-frequency backhauls (RF) or optical fibers (OF).
While RF is a cost-effective solution as compared to OF, it supports lower data
rate requirements. Another promising backhaul solution is the free-space optics
(FSO) as it offers both a high data rate and a relatively low cost. FSO,
however, is sensitive to nature conditions, e.g., rain, fog, line-of-sight.
This paper combines both RF and FSO advantages and proposes a hybrid RF/FSO
backhaul solution. It considers the problem of minimizing the cost of the
backhaul network by choosing either OF or hybrid RF/FSO backhaul links between
the base-stations (BS) so as to satisfy data rate, connectivity, and
reliability constraints. It shows that under a specified realistic assumption
about the cost of OF and hybrid RF/FSO links, the problem is equivalent to a
maximum weight clique problem, which can be solved with moderate complexity.
Simulation results show that the proposed solution shows a close-to-optimal
performance, especially for practical prices of the hybrid RF/FSO links.
