PRIORITY SCHEMES FOR HYBRID FIBER COAXIAL NETWORK MAC PROTOCOL

Abstract

The growth of Internet and other computer information services has out paced the expansion of data rate available to home users using conventional modems. The emerging Hybrid Fiber Coaxial (HFC) network is one of the front-runners in the race to provide residential community with bandwidth-intensive interactive applications, including video on demand, Internet access, and tele-conferencing. HFC networks utilizes the in place residential broadcast cable system to provide an immediate and cost effective solution to bandwidth demand. The main functionality of Medium Access control layer (MAC) protocol for bi-directional cable TV network using HFC technology is to control, the access of the various nodes on the shared upstream medium. The goal of this dissertation is to examine the multilevel priority collision resolution scheme for the MAC protocol for HFC networks. This scheme separates and resolves collisions between stations in priority order and this provides quick access to high priority requests. This scheme is further extended to reduce the access delays of the lower priority stations in scenario when there is no traffic from higher priority stations. This is done by allocating contention slots reserved for higher priority stations to lower priority stations. Simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed scheme. Simulation is carried out in LINUX 6.2 environment using C language.