A novel request minislot allocation mechanism based on temporal locality prediction for HFC networks

Abstract

Hybrid Fiber Coaxial (HFC) networks are emerging as the method of choice for residential networks. However, HFC networks are implemented using a shared network architecture, and hence collisions may occur in the upstream channel. In severe cases, these channel collisions can result in a significant reduction in network performance. Accordingly, this paper presents a request prediction (RP) mechanism which reduces the number of collisions by predicting the future transmission behavior of the cable modems (CMs) and reserving transmission opportunities for those CMs which are judged more likely to transmit data in the near future. Simulations are conducted to compare the performance of the RP mechanism with that of other request minislot allocation schemes. The simulation results reveal that the RP mechanism results in a lower average number of contentions, a reduced average data delay time, and a higher transmission success rate than other schemes, and is, in general, more efficient than other schemes.