With the rapid growth of the Internet as well as the increasing demand for broadband services, access networks have been receiving growing investments in recent years. This has led to a massive network deployment with the goal of eliminating the ba- width bottleneck between end-users and the network core. Today many diverse te- nologies are being used to provide broadband access to end users. The architecture and performance of the access segment (local loop, wired and wireless access n- works, and even home networks) are getting increasing attention for ensuring quality of service of diverse broadband applications. Moreover, most access lines will no longer terminate on a single device, thus leading to the necessity of having a home network designed for applications that transcend simple Internet access sharing among multiple personal computers and enable multimedia support. Therefore, the access network and its home portion have become a hot investment pool from both a fin- cial as well as a research perspective. The aim of the annual International Conference on Access Networks (AccessNets) is to provide a forum that brings together scientists and researchers from academia as well as managers and engineers from the industry and government organizations to meet and exchange ideas and recent work on all aspects of access networks and how they integrate with their in-home counterparts. After Athens in 2006, Ottawa in 2007, and Las Vegas in 2008, this year AccessNets moved to Asia for the first time.
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Access Networks, AccessNets 2009, held in Hong Kong, China, in November 2009.
The 11 revised full papers presented together with 8 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected. The papers present original and fundamental research advances in the area of access networks, such as hybrid dynamic bandwidth and wavelength allocation algorithm, diversified applications in EPON, unsolicited grant services (UGS), mobile WiMAX network, FiWi networks, integrated PON-WiMAX networks, cognitive radio networks, efficient and dynamic spectrum sharing, cross-layer routing method for SCTP, and vectored DSL.
