Advances in broadband access communications

Broadband access communications have been continuously developed with many advances in response to increasing demands of multimedia services and applications. Broadband communications systems are generally power- and bandwidth- limited while the communications channels are characterized by their frequency-selective fading and the presence of noise and interference. Due to the dynamic nature of both transmission media and multimedia traffic, re-configurable and adaptive schemes are of particular interest. Furthermore, in most broadband communications systems, interference is the major performance-limiting factor and interference mitigation can be more efficiently done by coordination of the transmission and resource allocation between users to minimize mutual interference in a collaborative manner. The talk will provide an overview of new developments/deployments in broadband access communications, and highlight technical issues in dynamic resource allocation and intelligent multi-dimensional signal processing and the evolution from competition, to cooperation and cognition in communications.