ΒAF

The main objective of the research is to contribute tothe development of standards for broadband access facilities for small business and residential subscribers, at the conceptual, technical application level:

• by studying issues and giving guidelines on architecture and topology, high speed transmission on shared fibres, protocols and traffic performance, communications management and security provisioning
• by specifying, developing and testing a prototype broadband access facility at 600 megabits per second which will be used to validate guidelines mentioned above
• by submitting this broadband access facility to a national field trial following completion of the project.

Key issues in the research include:

• Τhe feasiblity and performance of high speed time division multiple access (TDMA), and multiaccess (MAC) protocols and related asynchronous transfer (ATM) functions for shared media at 600 megabits per second;
• Τhe cost effectiveness and applicability of the ATM based passive optical network (PON) compared with other access solutions
• Τhe functionality and implementation options of communications management for broadband access system.

The research has resulted in a fair amount of knowledge about:

• Services which should be transported by a broadband access facility;
  the functions and system architecture
• The topology and specification of the optical network and its components
• The access protocols and the related UPC and customer access connection (CAC) functionality
• The framing and ranging functions for TDMA

This knowledge has resulted in a high level system specification of a broadband access facility which is based on TDMA via a passive optical tree.