Impact of Ingress Noise on the Communication on Hybrid Fiber-Coax (HFC) Networks

Hybrid fiber coax networks are excellent candidates for interactive multimedia services such as internet. However, due to their tree and branch structure, HFC networks are very susceptible to noise funneling. In this paper we present a measurement method and statistical post-processing for the upstream ingress noise that is independent of the modulation and access technique. The impact of ingress noise is evaluated for a TDMA/FDMA and CDMA access technique to illustrate this. The measurement and process software we used was completely developed in Labview™.