Flexible bandwidth allocation in hybrid fiber coax distribution networks

Hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) subscriber networks are a popular architecture for interactive video/multimedia on-demand services. The available downstream bandwidth for data transmission is partitioned into streams, typically 25-50 Mbps, shared by varied traffic of multiple subscribers. Given subscriber receivers that can tune one stream at a time, we show that correlated traffic can significantly increase the probability of blocking. The performance associated with uncorrelated traffic can be retrieved by offloading selected traffic from one stream to another, demonstrating a close association of configuration operations with call processing. We describe an algorithm that achieves this performance