A novel contention period control algorithm to improve throughput in HFC networks

The deployment of the hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) network has becomes ubiquitous to provide broadband services to the home. Due to the asymmetric natural of HFC network - the downstream bandwidth is substantially much larger than that of the upstream; therefore the upstream channel is critical to allocating and scheduling. In this paper, we propose a novel contention period control algorithm that incorporates bandwidth prediction capability in HFC networks to improve the utilization and throughput of the upstream bandwidth. Through simulations, we show that in all the cases studied in the paper, our adaptive method performs better than the MCNS DOCSIS.