The importance of Broadband Communications in shaping the future telecommunication network has achieved world-wide recognition. This volume validates the huge significance of the field and explores key items concerning research, development and applications. The ideas and experiences presented will be of great interest to operators and users, for research and development, from both a technical and a commercial perspective.

This book presents the latest advances and technology in broadband communication systems, such as IPv6, next-generation SONET, and WiMax. The book also treats wireless data and personal communication services in separate chapters and covers cable modems, passive optical networks, network security, testing, and analysis.

Integrated broadband networks (IBNs), when compared to high definition television, are seen by many as probably being more important to the future industrial competitiveness of the United States in the telecommunications field, and as certainly raising far more complex issues of economics, law, regulation, and social impact. The first concerted attempt to identify and investigate these issues was started in 1987 by a leading US telecommunications policy research center. This book presents key contributions to that study, each written by a leading authority in his field. Its breadth of coverage does justice to the multifaceted nature of the core policy issues; its scholarly standards make it a valuable resource for future researchers; and its relevance to immediate policy concerns makes it required reading for those who need to understand what will continue to be a highly controversial public debate for a long time to come.

The rapid development of optical fiber transmission technology has created the possibility for constructing digital networks that are as ubiquitous as the current voice network but which can carry video, voice, and data in massive qlJantities. How and when such networks will evolve, who will pay for them, and what new applications will use them is anyone's guess. There appears to be no doubt, however, that the trend in telecommunication networks is toward far greater transmission speeds and toward greater heterogeneity in the requirements of different applications. This book treats some of the central problems involved in these networks of the future. First, how does one switch data at speeds orders of magnitude faster than that of existing networks? This problem has roots in both classical switching for telephony and in switching for packet networks. There are a number of new twists here, however. The first is that the high speeds necessitate the use of highly parallel processing and place a high premium on computational simplicity. The second is that the required data speeds and allowable delays of different applications differ by many orders of magnitude. The third is that it might be desirable to support both point to point applications and also applications involving broadcast from one source to a large set of destinations.

Concentrates on quantitative methods such as modelling and performance analysis