With the increasing needs for delivering higher bandwidths to residential areas, new technologies (e.g. xDSL) are emerging that are enabling broadband access. Network technologies, which are based upon upgrades of existing network infrastructures, are, economically, one of the most promising approaches. One of these, competing with several other approaches, is hybrid fibre coax networks (HFC) currently being used for CATV broadcasting. The various access network technologies will be interconnected via broadband core networks resulting in heterogeneous networks which, have to provide end-to-end applications based on the Internet Protocol. Since the CATV network is of a shared nature, the provisioning of IP-based Quality of Service (QoS) requires suitable inter-laver signalling in order to provide QoS-related information as soon as possible to the relevant instances. This paper presents a system architecture using ATM-over-HFC for high-speed Internet access providing IP-based QoS. The architecture's seamless interoperability with other network technologies supports both IP-based and native ATM applications.
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