The main objective of the research is to contribute tothe development of standards for broadband access facilities for small business and residential subscribers, at the conceptual, technical application level:
by studying issues and giving guidelines on architecture and topology, high speed transmission on shared fibres, protocols and traffic performance, communications management and security provisioning;
by specifying, developing and testing a prototype broadband access facility at 600 megabits per second which will be used to validate guidelines mentioned above;
by submitting this broadband access facility to a national field trial following completion of the project.
Key issues in the research include:
the feasiblity and performance of high speed time division multiple access (TDMA), and multiaccess (MAC) protocols and related asynchronous transfer (ATM) functions for shared media at 600 megabits per second;
the cost effectiveness and applicability of the ATM based passive optical network (PON) compared with other access solutions;
the functionality and implementation options of communications management for broadband access system.
The research has resulted in a fair amount of knowledge about:
services which should be transported by a broadband access facility;
the functions and system architecture;
the topology and specification of the optical network and its components;
the access protocols and the related UPC and customer access connection (CAC) functionality;
the framing and ranging functions for TDMA.
This knowledge has resulted in a high level system specification of a broadband access facility which is based on TDMA via a passive optical tree.
