Tiers of Service for Data Access in a HFC Architecture
Kathleen M. Nichols · 1997
This paper discusses the Hybrid Fiber-Coaxial cable TV environment as a data delivery service providing subscribers with specific levels of service. We overview HFC for data delivery and Com21’s UPSTREAMS architecture for HFC data delivery using an ATM cell based format. We discuss the evaluation of levels of service for individual subscribers and the need for both new sim-ulation traffic models and for changing the common approach of evaluating communications sys-tems with simulation models that have only one-way paths. Results and a new simulation traffic model, based on web browsing, are presented. Finally, we give some early results on scheduling at different qualities of service, previously presented in [1]. Our scheduling algorithm is based on the Class-Based Queueing work of Floyd and Jacobson [14] applied at the MAC layer to ATM cells.