METHOD AND DEVICE FOR BANDWIDTH ALLOCATION IN MULTIPLE ACCESS PROTOCOLS WITH CONTENTION-BASED RESERVATION

摘要

The problem of allocating bandwidth on the upstream channel (26) of an HFCcable network (10) for contention-basedtransmission of requests that are used to reserve upstream bandwidth (26) fortransmission of user data is solved by a methodof allocation which dynamically adapts to the prevailing offered load ofreservation requests. In one embodiment this is done bydetermining an appropriate size for a contention interval in each upstreamtransmission frame by attempting to balance the rates offlow of user data into and out of a virtual global data queue using a fluidapproximation method that is based on a solution to abalanced equation relating the demand and supply of slots for datatransmission within each frame.