ABSTRACT

The future of broadband access networks depends significantly on today's demand of high-bandwidth and cost-effective technology to support emerging services. It is well known that optical networks and wireless networks are the preferred choice of networks in this domain. The advantages of high capacity and reliability of optical access networks can be combined with the benefits of wide coverage and high mobility of wireless access networks. Despite this, there are concerns in maintaining the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements along these two different mediums through a bandwidth allocation scheme, which is a crucial stage in data transmission as it significantly affects network fairness, throughput, and delay. This chapter reviews both optical and wireless networks in brief, including their future developments beyond the next-generation passive optical network 2 (NG-PON2) and the fifth generation (5G) of wireless networks. The matters of QoS and bandwidth allocation schemes for heterogeneous optical and wireless networks, including previous high-potential work on integrated PON-wireless networks along with their QoS-aware bandwidth allocation schemes, are discussed thoroughly.