Integrated Wireless-pon access Network Architectures Milos Milosavljevic

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8
8
Project Achievements and Future Work
Contents 
8.1 Research Drive................................................................................... 151 
8.2 Achievements .................................................................................... 154 
8.3 Future Work ....................................................................................... 160 
References................................................................................................ 165
This chapter serves the purpose of summarising the simulation and experimental work 
performed in the course of this research programme. In particular, a leading-edge 
wireless/optical access network architecture has been developed and demonstrated, providing 
high capacity backhauling links to support emerging broadband wireless solutions.
8.1 Research Drive
While both data (driven by an increasingly media-centric Internet) and video (driven by the 
adoption of new high definition hardware and content) services continue to see enormous 
increase in bandwidth demand, the access and metropolitan telecommunications network 
hierarchy remain relatively underdeveloped compared to the high capacity backbone networks. 
To overcome this ultra-broadband bandwidth “bottleneck” as far as the end user is concerned, 
optical fibre networks provide a future-proof solution for meeting the growing demand with 
guaranteed expansion possibilities, since the copper solution using digital subscriber line 
transmission techniques is approaching its theoretical capacity. However, the considerable fibre 
cabling cost and low levels of equipment sharing (especially in least densely populated areas) 
make the deployment of fully end-to-end active fibre optic networks currently impractical, 
pointing towards the solution of PONs. 

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