Considering the key evolutions within the access network technologies as well as the unprecedented levels of bandwidth demands by end users, this book condenses the relentless research, design, and deployment experience of state-of-the-art access networks. Furthermore, it shares the critical steps and details of the developments and deployment of these emergent technologies; which is very crucial particularly as telecommunications vendors and carriers are looking for cost-effective ultra-broadband “last-mile” access solutions to stay competitive in the “post bubble” era. The book is written to provide a comprehensive overview of the major broadband access technologies and deployments involving internationally recognized authors and key players. Due to its scope and depth, the proposed book is able to fill an important gap of today’s available literature.

This book constitutes the reviewed post-proceedings of the 5th International ICST Conference on Access Networks, AccessNets 2010, and of the satellite event , the First International ICST Workshop on Autonomic Networking and Self-Management in Access Networks, SELFMAGICNETS 2010, held jointly in Budapest, Hungary in November 2010. The 19 revised full papers presented together with one invited paper and four poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. The papers are organized in topical sections on next generation wireless networks, emerging applications, next-generation broadband networks and autonomic networking and network self-management.

The evolution of broadband access networks toward bimodal fiber-wireless (FiWi) access networks, described in this book, may be viewed as the endgame of broadband access. After discussing the economic impact of broadband access and current worldwide deployment statistics, all the major legacy wireline and wireless broadband access technologies are reviewed. State-of-the-art GPON and EPON fiber access networks are described, including their migration to next-generation systems such as OCDMA and OFDMA PONs. The latest developments of wireless access networks are covered, including VHT WLAN, Gigabit WiMAX, LTE and WMN. The advantages of FiWi access networks are demonstrated by applying powerful network coding, heterogeneous optical and wireless protection, hierarchical frame aggregation, hybrid routing and QoS continuity techniques across the optical-wireless interface. The book is an essential reference for anyone working on optical fiber access networks, wireless access networks or converged FiWi systems.

With the rapid growth of the Internet as well as the increasing demand for broadband services, access networks have been receiving growing investments in recent years. This has led to a massive network deployment with the goal of eliminating the ba- width bottleneck between end-users and the network core. Today many diverse te- nologies are being used to provide broadband access to end users. The architecture and performance of the access segment (local loop, wired and wireless access n- works, and even home networks) are getting increasing attention for ensuring quality of service of diverse broadband applications. Moreover, most access lines will no longer terminate on a single device, thus leading to the necessity of having a home network designed for applications that transcend simple Internet access sharing among multiple personal computers and enable multimedia support. Therefore, the access network and its home portion have become a hot investment pool from both a fin- cial as well as a research perspective. The aim of the annual International Conference on Access Networks (AccessNets) is to provide a forum that brings together scientists and researchers from academia as well as managers and engineers from the industry and government organizations to meet and exchange ideas and recent work on all aspects of access networks and how they integrate with their in-home counterparts. After Athens in 2006, Ottawa in 2007, and Las Vegas in 2008, this year AccessNets moved to Asia for the first time.

Considering the key evolutions within the access network technologies as well as the unprecedented levels of bandwidth demands by end users, this book condenses the relentless research, design, and deployment experience of state-of-the-art access networks. Furthermore, it shares the critical steps and details of the developments and deployment of these emergent technologies; which is very crucial particularly as telecommunications vendors and carriers are looking for cost-effective ultra-broadband “last-mile” access solutions to stay competitive in the “post bubble” era. The book is written to provide a comprehensive overview of the major broadband access technologies and deployments involving internationally recognized authors and key players. Due to its scope and depth, the proposed book is able to fill an important gap of today’s available literature.

The access network is expected to be one of the major battlegrounds of telecommunications network operators, since upgrades of the existing narrowband access network will be the critical factor in supplying multimedia broadband services in a competitive market. The future broadband access network architecture needs to be flexible enough to efficiently support the provision of a full set of broadband and narrowband services with a wide range of capacity demands. A wide range of broadband access technologies are available. Furthermore, the key issues in the upgrading of the very cost sensitive access network are financial as well as technological, both for incumbent and new entrant operators. Thus, in order to identify minimum-risk introductory strategies the economic viability of access network broadband upgrades needs to be carefully assessed. However, despite the definite need for techno-economic evaluations, very few books have been published in this field. One of the reasons might be that broadband access network upgrading only very recently gained wide recognition as a key challenge for broadband delivery. Secondly, this kind of strategic work and these studies tend to be considered rather sensitive by operators, and thus both results and methodologies are not usually readily available. Thirdly, the work reported in this book in many respects was a major pioneering effort, which quite ambitiously aimed at modelling the whole life-cycle costs and revenue streams of access network upgrades, as opposed to several other efforts, which often are limited to pure investment cost comparisons.

Broadband optical access network is an ideal solution to alleviate the first/last mile bottleneck of current Internet infrastructures. Richly illustrated throughout to help clarify important topics, Broadband Optical Access Networks covers the architectures, protocols enabling technologies of broadband optical access networks, and all current and future competing technologies for access networks. This comprehensive work presents the evolution of optical access networks, including reach extension, bandwidth enhancement, and discusses the convergence of optical and wireless technologies for broadband access, making it an invaluable reference for researchers, electrical engineers, and graduate students.

Remote network access (RNA) is the network technology that enables us to work anywhere, anytime. Coverage includes a complete review of remote networking technologies and LAN-based applications.

This book will highlight the motivation for coherent optics in access and introduce digital coherent optical system in detail, including advanced modulation formats, architecture of modulation and detection, and DSP flow for both transmitter and receiver. This book will also demonstrate potential approaches to re-design and re-engineer the digital coherent concept from long-haul and metro solutions to the access network, leveraging reduction in complexity and cost as well as the benefits of capacity increases and operational improvements. This book will illustrate the details on optimization of the digital, optical, and electrical complexity and standardization and interoperability.

C-RAN and virtualized Small Cell technology poses several major research challenges. These include dynamic resource allocation, self-configuration in the baseband pool, high latency in data transfer between radio unit and baseband unit, the cost of data delivery, high volume of data in the network, software networking aspects, potential energy savings, security concerns, privacy of user’s personal data at a remote place, limitations of virtualized environment, etc. This book provides deeper insights into the next generation RAN architecture and surveys the coexistence of SDN, C-RAN and Small Cells solutions proposed in the literature at different levels.