New houses are commonly equipped with standard
category 5/5+ cabling to facilitate deployment and interconnection of personal devices.
Such HANs do represent a significant data source nowadays, mainly due to the increasing
number of digital online services, such as online gaming, Video On Demand (VoD),
and information searching, producing a steadily growing data flow that needs to be
delivered to the WAN aggregation plane.
This transformation of backbone, enterprise, and home networks, coupled with the
tremendous (virtually exponential) growth of Internet traffic volume observed for the
last couple of years (see e.g., www.ieee802.org/3/hssg/public/mar07/bach_01_0307.pdf,
www.ieee802.org/3/hssg/public/jan07/lee_01_0107.pdf, or www.ieee802.org/3/hssg/
public/sep06/steenman_01_0906.pdf), only emphasizes the aggravating gap between
the aforementioned network layers, resulting from the lack of well-developed access
networks, where bandwidth is currently scarce, expensive, and commonly hard to obtain.
With little investment and almost no plans for development, existing copper-based
systems, including ISDN and DSL lines, as well as hybrid (mixed copper and fiber) solutions,
deployed mainly by CATV companies, all exhibit signs of bandwidth shortage
right now, with no advanced digital service available yet.
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