Abstract
A Hybrid Fiber Coaxial (HFC) plant is typically configured in a tree topology and covers a large area with tens of thousands of House Holds Passed (HHP) and several return paths into the headend. During initial deployment, it is usually the case that the number of cable modem subscribers is small compared to the HHP, resulting in a small number of modems spread out over the return paths. To operate more efficiently, the return paths should be combined to reduce the port requirement at the headend.
A simple upstream RF combiner can be used to merge separate return paths, but that would also funnel the noise of the separate paths and degrade performance. Instead, what is needed is an upstream aggregation device that will multiplex the paths without aggregating the noise. To do so, such a device needs to operate with the HFC’s MAC (media access control) layer and employ multiplexing discipline that incurs limited impact on performance under varying modem distribution scenarios. In addition, this device must be simple and transparent to the rest of the HFC system.
In this paper, we describe through analysis and simulation how such a return path multiplexing device is possible, and how it impacts the HFC network architecture and upstream performance.
The original version of this chapter was revised: The copyright line was incorrect. This has been corrected. The Erratum to this chapter is available at DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-35388-3_42
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© 1998 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
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Yee, J.C. (1998). A new HFC architecture using return path multiplexing. In: van As, H.R. (eds) High Performance Networking. HPN 1998. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing, vol 8. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35388-3_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35388-3_3
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