Broadband Optical Access Networks

PREFACE

The roots of this book were planted about a decade ago. At that time, I became increasingly convinced that wide-area and metropolitan-area networks, where much of my group’s research has been centered at that time, were in good shape. Although research in these fields was (and still is) needed, that’s not where the networking bottleneck seemed to be. Rather, the bottleneck was (and still is in many places) in the access networks, which choked users’ access to information and services. It was clear to me that the long-term solution to that problem has to involve optical fiber access networks.

That conviction led me to switch the focus of my group’s research to optical access networks. In turn, that decision led to a decade of exciting exceptionally interesting research into the many challenges facing modern access networks. These challenges include rapidly increasing demands for larger bandwidth and better quality of service, graceful evolution to more powerful solutions without complete rebuilding of existing infrastructure, enhancing network range and number of users, improving access networks’ resilience, simplifying network architecture, finding better control strategies, and solving the problem of fiber/wireless integration. All these problems would have to be solved while maintaining the economic viability of access networks so that operators would be prepared to make the necessary (and huge) investment in fiber and other infrastructure.

Finding solutions for the ...