MUSE: Challenges to Integrate the Multi-Disciplinary Field of BB Access in One Project

MUSE (Multi Service Access Everywhere) is one of the major Integrated Projects in the strategic objective "Broadband for All" of the IST (Information Society and Technology) European 6th Framework Programme. Its overall goal is the research and development of a future, low cost, multi-service broadband access network [1]. It gathers a multi-disciplinary field of research ranging from network architectures, access and edge nodes, first mile solutions, and residential gateways (cf. Figure 1). The main outputs of MUSE are research reports specifying a multi-access architecture, a detailed description of the functionality and prototypes for each network element, and evaluation reports of integrated lab trials. There is a balance of shorter term research aimed at contributions in standardisation and longer term research to investigate the feasibility of novel concepts.