Access to B-ISDN via PONs. ATM communication in practice (Q2785421)

[The articles of this volume will not be indexed individually.] NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEEngineers are familiar with hybrid systems. During their education they are usually confronted with clear cut principles leading to optimal solutions. The systems they build during their industrial careers however, are often hybrid. This results from a sort of compromise aimed at collecting all the strong points of different solutions while attempting to avoid their individual drawbacks. NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEThis book is also a hybrid. It aims at meeting two goals and at the same time tries to reconcile the resulting conflicts stemming from different styles and ways of presentation. In the first two sections the book gives short tutorials on the topics of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) and passive optical networks (PONs). Section 3 then describes the various aspects of developing an ATM-based PON. Sections 1 and 2 roughly represent the knowledge of the members of the team who started in January 1992 to build a system for which no forerunners are described in today's textbooks. The team was formed from a consortium of telecom companies, network operators and universities, and committed itself to building a broadband access network as a contribution to the RACE II project. The work was done under the name ``Broadband Access Facilities (BAF)'' and ended in June 1995. NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEThe different chapters of the book address by necessity a very broad scope of issues. Metastability in electronic circuitry, traffic theory and encryption are topics which do not seem at first glance to have a common denominator. Nevertheless, while avoiding becoming a patchwork, this book thoroughly addresses all the problems that need consideration in the design of a new communication system. There is a continuous thread from the foundations of Sections 1 and 2 to the experiments performed on the running prototype. Therefore the purpose of the book is twofold. It not only describes a piece of modern communication technology, but also illustrates the methodology of how problems are decomposed and solved making use of different engineering disciplines.