## 1 Introduction  
Expecting that optical fiber paves all the way to and penetrates into the home of residential and business customers in the near to midterm, we elaborate on the final frontier of optical networks, namely, the convergence with their wireless counterparts. Due to the difficulty and prohibitive costs of supplying optical fiber to all end-user premises as well as the spectrum limitations of wireless access networks,hybrid fiber-wireless (FiWi) access networks seem to be more attractive than relying on either stand-alone access solution. FiWi networks are realized by integrating wireless access technologies, e.g., cellular, WiMAX, and WiFi, with installed optical fiber infrastructure that has been pushed ever closer toward end-users over the last few years [1]. Optical and wireless technologies can be thought of as quite complementary and will expectedly coexist over the next decades. Future broadband access networks will be bimodal, capitalizing on the respective strengths of both technologies and smartly merging them in order to realize future-proof FiWi networks that strengthen our information society while avoiding its digital divide. By combining the capacity of optical fiber networks with the ubiquity and mobility of wireless networks, FiWi networks form a powerful platform for the support and creation of emerging as well as future unforeseen applications and services, e.g., telepresence [2]. According to the European Telecommunications Standardization Institute (ETSI), fixed mobile convergence (FMC) is concerned with developing network capabilities and supporting standards that may be used to seamlessly offer a set of consistent services via fixed or mobile access to fixed or mobile, public or private, networks, independently of the access technique [3]. FMC can be done at different levels, e.g., business or service provisioning level. Note, however, that FMC does not necessarily imply the physical convergence of networks. FiWi research focuses on the physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layers with the goal to develop and investigate low-cost enabling FiWi technologies as well as layer-2 protocols and algorithms. It is important to note that the higher-layer network capabilities developed through FMC standardization efforts can be exploited on top of the PHY and MAC layers of FiWi networks. At the PHY layer, FiWi research inquires new methods of optical radio frequency (RF) generation exploiting fiber nonlinearities and various modulation techniques. It also includes the study of different remodulation schemes for the design of colorless (_i.e._, wavelength-independent) remote antenna units (RAUs). While significant progress has been made at the PHY layer of FiWi and in particular radio-over-fiber (RoF) transmission systems, FiWi networking research on layer-2 related issues has begun only very recently. Among others, FiWi layer-2 research includes the joint optimization of performance-enhancing MAC mechanisms separately used in the wireless and optical network segments, e.g., wireless frame aggregation and optical burst assembly, hybrid access control protocols, integrated path selection algorithms, as well as advanced resilience techniques. Layer-2 networking research is crucial to unleash the full potential of quality-of-service (QoS)-aware future FiWi networks [4]. QoS and quality-of-experience (QoE) play a key role in providing various multimedia applications and services over hybrid FiWi networks. From a networking point of view, both QoS and QoE represent challenging issues in heterogeneous networks, especially for streaming media applications [5]. More specifically, while QoS support is achievable by managing the networking layers, QoE requires improvements at the end-user application level. For instance, to provide high-quality mobile IPTV services, key QoS metrics, such as packet loss, bandwidth, delay, jitter, and packet-error ratio, are important [6].