MAC level access protocol for continuous media applications on hybrid-fiber-coax (HFC) networks

In this paper, admission control issue is considered in the MAC level access protocol design for supporting the continuous media applications on HFC network. We treat service admission requests and interactive requests the different priority level requests. And the number of contention minislots of upstream channel for these two priority levels are not fixed. The headend checks the system resources and dynamically allocate the contention minislots for the service admission requests. For example, if there are not enough system resource to admit a new service request, the contention minislots for the service admission requests will be decreased and more contention minislots will be allocated to the interactive requests. A set of simulation scenarios is presented to show that the proposed scheme is suitable for continuous media applications.