Adaptive MAC Protocol for a Cable Modem
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Author(s)
Sala, Dolors
Limb, J. O. (John O.)
Khaunte, Sunil Upendra
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Abstract
Cable plants were initially designed for one-way
broadcast communication (from the head-end to the neighborhood). They
are now being upgraded to provide an upstream path (from the home to the
head-end). New challenges arise in using the upstream channel since
the available bandwidth is low and the noise levels are high. In this
paper we present a MAC protocol especially designed to efficiently
share the scarce upstream capacity. The protocol dynamically adjusts
operating parameters to the current workload on the system. The
control mechanism does not require any framing structure and is built
around a "sea of mini-slots". The performance under both static and
highly dynamic loads is close to optimum. The station implementation
is particularly simple and the downstream control structure is also
simple. Results are given here for fixed length data units (ATM cells)
but the algorithm extends very simply to variable length MAC frames.
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Date
1997
Extent
338638 bytes
Resource Type
Text
Resource Subtype
Technical Report