With the rapid growth of the Internet as well as the increasing demand for broadband services, access networks have been receiving growing investments in recent years. This has led to a massive network deployment with the goal of eliminating the ba- width bottleneck between end-users and the network core. Today many diverse te- nologies are being used to provide broadband access to end users. The architecture and performance of the access segment (local loop, wired and wireless access n- works, and even home networks) are getting increasing attention for ensuring quality of service of diverse...