Ubiquitous Broadband Access Networks with Peer-to-Peer Application Support

Many last-mile access technologies exist, including cable, DSL (digital subscriber line), powerline (the world’s largest infrastructure), free-space optics, and broadcast satellite (which is attractive for both urban and rural areas, even isolated areas not serviceable by terrestrial methods). Unfortunately, these technologies represent a significant bottleneck between a highspeed residential network and a largely overbuilt core backbone network. This in turn makes it difficult to support end-to-end quality of service (QoS) for a wide variety of applications, including emerging peer-to-peer (PTP) applications and non-elastic applications such as voice and video, which cannot tolerate variable or excessive delay or data loss. This paper presents an architecture to help realize widespread broadband access connectivity with PTP application support. The importance of combining multihop wireless access with multi-wavelength optical access will be illustrated.