"Research and standardization efforts during the past years have been intensified towards extending the scope of access networking to cover larger geographical areas and numbers of users. The main driver has been the reduction of CAPEX/OPEX costs by enabling consolidation of current Local Offices to a much reduced number of Central Offices. This paradigm blurs the hitherto defined boundaries between the access and the metro segments – the central offices become effectively Edge Nodes, required to handle significantly increased amount of user traffic.The goal of this project is to define novel, resilient, cost- and energy-efficient architectures achieving efficient access-core interconnection and convergence among heterogeneous access technologies, services and applications. At the end of this project, we would have proposed and validated concepts to achieve ultra high data rates (up to 100Gbps per wavelength), enhanced resource utilization and flexible bandwidth allocation at sub-wavelength granularities.The timely generated knowledge in this project will contribute to extend the-state-of-the-art and enhance European research excellence and competitiveness in developing future communication networks."