Mobile network operators and service providers are faced with the prospect of mobile data delivery costs outweighing revenues. In their quest for a ubiquitous ultra-high bandwidth communication infrastructure towards 5G, the backhaul and fronthaul network segments are becoming major performance-limiting factors and thus a pressing concern in mobile networks. In the past, most 4G LTE network research has been focusing on the achievable performance gains in the wireless front-end only without looking into the details of backhaul implementations and possible backhaul bottlenecks. It is only recently that backhaul- and fronthaul-aware 4G studies have begun to take capacity-limited backhaul and fronthaul links, as found in many of today’s existing systems, into account and investigated the performance-limiting impact and details of different backhaul and fronthaul technologies.

To cope with the unprecedented growth of mobile data traffic driven by the popularity of smart phones and mobile-connected tablets running diverse data-centric applications, the removal of the traditional barriers between coverage-centric 4G mobile networks and capacity-centric fiber-wireless (FiWi) broadband access networks based on low-cost data-centric Ethernet technologies represents one of several promising approaches to benefit from fiber backhaul sharing and WiFi offloading capabilities in unified cellular and FiWi broadband access networks.

The scope of this workshop is to explore emerging trends and report on recent progress to unleash the full potential of unified cellular and FiWi access networks, including their convergence with other technologies and economic sectors for future non-incremental FiWi research such as networked robotics as envisioned by the emerging Tactile Internet.