PREFACE
The optical networking technology that suffered in the post-dot-com crash several years ago has since recovered and is once again poised for rapid growth due to the exhaustion of available bandwidth. Today, photonics networks transport Internet data over large distances in long-haul and metropolitan networks. Improvements in photonics components and silicon chips have enabled several new technologies that are changing how these networks are built and operated. While the network core has always been optical Internet access traditionally secured through wireline access networks, various DSL (ADSL, VDSL, VDSL2), cable (DOCSIS 2.0, DOCSIS 3.0), and passive optical networks (BPON, GPON, EPON) have been used. The challenge in the YouTube and Facebook era is to manage the amount of traffic and service growth while securing or preferably growing revenue. In particular, dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) in passive optical networks (PON) presents a key issue for providing efficient and fair utilization of the PON upstream bandwidth while supporting the quality of service (QoS) requirements for different traffic classes.
Wireless networks have been booming largely independently of changes in photonic and wireline networks. WLAN (IEEE 802.11), Zigbee (IEEE 802.15.4), WiMax (IEEE 802.16), and 3G/4G cellular telephony are growing quickly, while 60 GHz, wireless sensor networks and cognitive radios are starting to be considered for volume deployment. In the next 10 years, Internet access ...
